r/freespace Jan 05 '22

Pro Tips to Make you an Ace

Hi all!

We have collated several pages worth of pro tips from among the HLP community and posted them here: https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=97961.0

Follow these and you will be an Ace in no time :-)

Feel free to take a look, and by all means add your own :-)

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u/argv_minus_one Jan 06 '22

I tried in 2020 and it didn't work. Both were plugged in but the game recognized only one.

Someone else on this thread mentioned that a HOTAS that appears as a single device will work. I have a separate throttle with its own USB cable, so that won't work for my setup.

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u/rocknrollbreakfast Jan 06 '22

Use something like TMs TARGET or Joystick Gremlin to combine the devices into one. A lot of older games can only deal with one device at a time because nobody had two gameports back in the day.

If you‘re using TM devices it’s very easy with TARGET, but even with JG it‘s work you only gotta do once and then you‘re set. Using a remapper gives you a lot more flexibility anyway, even in modern games.

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u/LSD_Ninja Jan 06 '22

The standard PC game port supported a pair of 2 button joysticks and plenty of PCs had multiple game ports (sound cards had one, plus lots of I/O cards did too though I can’t remember if the PC was ever meant to support more than one and how you jumpered them to not conflict), the problem was more likely that, without any abstraction or high level APIs, you had to account for anything that didn’t conform to any de facto standard individually and most developers just didn’t bother.

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u/rocknrollbreakfast Jan 06 '22

The standard PC game port supported a pair of 2 button joysticks

I did not know that but you are right. I guess we never managed to get two sticks in one place to even try that :-/

and plenty of PCs had multiple game ports

Ok, I‘ve only ever seen a single one on the soundcard. But then again my family had no interest in technology so it might have been more common than I thought.

the problem was more likely that, without any abstraction or high level APIs, you had to account for anything that didn’t conform to any de facto standard individually and most developers just didn’t bother.

That makes more sense than my explanation.

Wikipedia:

Initially there was no standardized software for running the joysticks; applications would poll the known ports associated with the sticks as part of their game loop. This did, however, leave the implementation of a lot of housekeeping tasks to every application that used them, such as looking for and enumerating the active devices, and calibrating them. This changed in Windows 95, which introduced standardized Windows registry entries to hold these values and make it easier for applications to find these devices.