Flightstick Pro Conversion?

[wcndave]

I have an old flightstick pro, great in it's day, wing commander, star wars...

anyway it uses the old game port, and i would love to make it a USB pluggable controller for the odd games that need it.

Can I do this? can i get a gameport to usb converter? can i just take the wires, and and 2 will be ground / live and the rest will be "buttons" and map to up / down / left / right / fire etc...?

hope someone's done this before,  Thanks
Dave

[BadMouth]

Just get a usb/gameport adapter.

I have this one and it works fine:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-PC-to-15-pin-Gameport-Adapter-for-Flight-Joystick-C-/170495865357?pt=US_USB_Wi_Fi_Adapters_Dongles&hash=item27b258720d


There are some odd old controls that it doesn't work with, mostly those that had more than 3 axis or force feedback.
You should be fine.

[BadMouth]

can i just take the wires, and and 2 will be ground / live and the rest will be "buttons" and map to up / down / left / right / fire etc...?

No, it's an analogue control.  It has an x-axis and a y-axis that work off potentiometers, not separate up/down/left/right inputs.

If you cut the wires, you'd have to use an A-Pac or U-HID as an interface.
The USB converter is cheaper and doesn't require any work.

[wcndave]

I can get this here, http://www.amazon.co.uk/PC-Arena-Male-Joystick-Adapter/dp/B003O3RDG4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349366589&sr=8-1

However would this still work in MAME.  Is there a driver issue, that if the flighstick is no longer supported in W7, that it will not work, or will the MAME analogue devices pick it up...

I guess there's a way to find out...

[BadMouth]

I can get this here, http://www.amazon.co.uk/PC-Arena-Male-Joystick-Adapter/dp/B003O3RDG4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349366589&sr=8-1

However would this still work in MAME.  Is there a driver issue, that if the flighstick is no longer supported in W7, that it will not work, or will the MAME analogue devices pick it up...

I guess there's a way to find out...

Not sure about that model.  The person that left the bad review was trying to use it with a ffb stick, which doesn't work with the one I linked either.
It has nothing to do with the joystick being incompatible with Windows 7.  Windows doesn't see the joystick, it just sees the adapter as a generic joystick.

There is nothing inside most of these old joysticks but a couple slide potentiometers and the buttons - No circuit board, no chips...nothing.
All the communication with the pc was done by the gameport interface itself. 
In this case, it is done by the gameport adapter.

[wcndave]

Meaning it should work ;-)