I found a Spaceball in among junk at work. Usable joystick ?

[TheTrevor]

It has forward-back, left-right and up-down, (6 degrees of freedom) and 12 mappable buttons. Plugs into the old 9-pin serial port.

http://reviews.cnet.com/sc/9687116-2-200-0.gif

The driver cd has files from 2000, including win32 and unix folders ; I'm running XP Pro. A demo is included, seems to work ok putting a 3d puzzle together (quite proud of myself!). Any thoughts ?
Cheers,
TheTrevor.

(Competent, 98 from being Dangerous)

Additional - I was really just asking if anybody else used one, if it was any good, and if so, how to make it work in Oolite ?

BTW, Dangerous now . . . grrrr

[ArkanoiD]

Seems that it is not supported

[Rese249er]

Try a program that remaps keyboard buttons to joystick... *digs around in the ol' noggin*

Being an Ubuntu user, I would use rejoystick, but seeing as you're using Windows I really dunno what to tell you.

[ArkanoiD]

Ha. I am not a windows user. But there are two problems with Spaceball: first is quite complex, to make long story short -- it is not a joystick from API side. And the second one -- is there is a regression bug in all modern linux distributions so serial one just does not work anymore at all.

That's a shame because it is perfect 3d navigation device.

[Diziet Sma]

Hi The Trevor. Interesting gadget..

ArkanoiD, it seems that it comes in a USB version too.. you might get that to work under Linux.


For anyone with a Spaceball and Windows, this might be worth a shot:
While the Vrlogic Spaceball isn't listed amongst the 860+ devices that Xpadder supports, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if you could use it to make it work with Oolite. Check it out, maybe discuss it with the Xpadder developer, and decide if it's worth spending $10 to find out.