This text is only at draft state.

Why there are so many problems with PC joysticks ?

This document tries to describe why PC joysticks work so baddly. Typical problems with PC joystick are need for calibration and some games fail to work on fast computers with joystics. When soundcards comes to the picture the problems are increased to include the problems that some joysticks fail to work properly when connected to joystick port of soundcards and even some soundcards stop working properly when some joysticks are plugged to them!

Those all problems are reality and I have experienced most of them myself. I have received lots questions of different kind of joystick problems and I have been able to solve almost all of them. So I know that is wrong in the joystick and soundcard combination, but the manufacturers of PC soundcards and joysticks seem to not to understand the problem or just ignore it. My suspection is that this industry just doesn't understand the problem or at least the tech support of the companies making those products don't understand it. I have received also numerous reports on that the technical support people od major brands do not know about the problems and are incapable of give any useful help to people who face those compatibility problems.

What is wrong in PC joystick interface implementations ?

Original design was bad

The original IBM PC josytick interface is not an example of good computer engineering. It was just the simplest possible interface you could build and still get it to work.

Adding the MIDI to joystick port was justs asking for trouble

When Creative Labs released their original 8-bit Sound Blaster card at around 1990 they had made a new soundcard product with following specs:

Basically this should be a good combination of options for PC players to start playing. Otherwise the design was quite good but there was one big problem: The implementation of the MIDI interface.

Instead of putting separate connector(s) for the MID interface Creative Labs had taken another route: esternal MIDI adapter which plugs to the joystick port. Because the joystick port pins had already functions specified for each pin, the designers had to change a fuctions of few joystick port pins to be able to add the MIDI signals to the joystick port connector. The problem starts here, because you will always get problems if you start messing around and make products which look like standard but do not fully meet the standards.

When soundcard industry really started to catch on all major soundcard makers copied the system which was used by Creative Labs. Maybe the other manufacturers did not know what they were doing or they intentionally selected the cheapest alternative, even it might lead to compatibility problems.

The addition of MIDI interface to joystick port has lead to the following common problems:

Problems with new 3.3V joytick ports

PC joystick industry has known for over 15 years that you get +5V power form the PC joystick port and designed their products to use it. Building a joystick connector to soundcard which outputs 3.3V instead of 5V seems to be like asking for troube, because every joystick is designed in mind that you get nice 5V from the interface. If the joystick is just simple analogue joytick, then the voltage change does not affect anythign if the joystick interface is designed according this. But if you happen to own a joystick with some advanced functions (autofire, digital functions, programability) I would be pretty sure that circuit designed to operate only at 5V will fail to operate correctly on 3.3V voltage.

What joystick manufacturers could have been done to the problems

When the joystick manufacturers saw the rise of the soundcards they could have solved lots of joystick problems by making a few changes to their existing products and designing the new products so that they would work correctly with soundcards and normal joytick ports. Making a joystick compatilble with both normal joystick ports and soundcard joystick ports involves just very minor changes to the original design: Just change wiring of two wires inside joystick! It is all what is needed to sweep away the compatibility problems.

But it seem that the joystick industry haven't done nothign to this. It might be that they do not see the problem or they want to sell their own joystick cards to be installed besides the soundcard (which already has otherwise well working joystick port, except those stupid MIDI pins causing problems ).


Tomi Engdahl <Tomi.Engdahl@iki.fi>

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