sidewinder serial gamepad and xp

[mamefan12345]

Hi all, I heard the sidewinder software is only for win95/98 and will not work on xp ?  I need to program some of the buttons ex--1st up, 2nd up and coin in how can I do this on xp??

[rampy]

for which emulator?  MAME (which varient?)  From withing mame's TAB menu you can define what buttons do what (including 1up and player 1 start etc...)  

And for serial gamepad do you mean gameport?

have you tried looking at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/sidewinder/

I'm not using sidewinders with XP but if I can be of help for using em with MAME let me know...

rampy

[Howard_Casto]

It has to be gameport as there is no such thing as a serial sidewinder.....

The sidewinder will work fine in any version of windows.  It's a microsfot controller and thus it is alwyas supported.  As for the crappy software that comes with it, I honestly don't know.  

Btw read up on your computer terminology.  It's hard to give advice when no one knows what your are talking about.  

[tom61]

sidewinder serial gamepad

Are you sure you don't mean game port or USB sidewinder? Or maybe Gravis serial gamepad (designed for older laptops).

[lightspeed]

Believe it or not, I've had it out w/ Microsoft over this issue:

SIDEWINDER PROFILER SOFTWARE THAT WORKS WITH WINDOWS XP/2000 IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR THE GAMEPORT SIDEWINDERS, AND NEVER WILL BE.

Sorry for the caps, but it pisses me off everytime I think about it.  That said, your options are:

set the controller up as a standard controller in XP, and configure the controls in the MAME tab menu (make sure joystick support is enabled)

buy a new gamepad (USB Sidewinder Pros ship with a Profiler version that is not even available via download from SW Central).    This version, while not certified with XP, works fine with it.

MS's response is that the gameport sidewinders are no longer supported.   However, for some reason, they won't even put the Profiler version up for download that works w/ the USB versions in 2000/XP.  If you happened to buy an earlier USB version (which didn't ship with the newest software), you're still screwed.   Funny how the only option is to buy a new game controller.  

[rampy]

well.. you could if you were married to the controller... get the gameport to USB adapter... but might as well just buy the usb version at that point...

There's some other utilities out there you probably could use as well, like maybe joy to key or the like...   won't mame see the sidewinder in windows without anydrivers if you use the -joy sidewinder switch?  

*shrug* that's how it works for me in DOS (yes, I know.. different animals... but seems like the library mame uses for inputs would work in either environment, no?)

YMMv

rampy

[Howard_Casto]

Well no offense but the sidewinder profiler software is useless anyway... I've did some testing with it, do you realize the amount of processes it uses?  It's a super duper resource hog, more so then some of my wrappers that check for keypresses. (And they are horribly unoptimized.)

Anyway, even on a modern pc the profiler software causes a significant slowdown during gameplay.  It also has major issues with your sound card in the gameport version.  Joytokey and the other freeware/shareware solutions are way more efficent believe it or not.

This is the reason that m$ no longer supports the profiler software in the gameport version, because quite frankly it never worked right to begin with.  

[Psyklops]

Hi all, I heard the sidewinder software is only for win95/98 and will not work on xp ?  I need to program some of the buttons ex--1st up, 2nd up and coin in how can I do this on xp??

I'm using 2 gameport Sidewinder's daisy-chained together under XP.  I had to add the gamepads manually under the game controllers section of the control panel using the sidewinder driver that ships with XP.  There is no need for the profiler software at this point unless you are running an emulator that only supports keyboard.  From the TAB menu in MAME you can configure the joystick buttons to be assigned to the various mame functions.  When launching MAME just make sure you use the -joy parameter so that it enables joystick support.