by Jethro Q. Walrustitty » Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:05 pm
1) MS Sidewinder is not a horrible gamepad. Any more than every gamepad is. I still long for the days of real joysticks.
2) PS2 adapters can be decent if you get the right one. Big S bought one to hook up dance pads to her laptop to play Stepmania, and it appears to work very well (after a little fiddling. Actually, I think a little toggle switch was set wrong.)
3) Onboard audio is usually quite good nowadays. In fact, my home theater PC is going to have the nVidia "Soundstorm", which is on only a few nForce 2 mbs, which dynamically encodes all audio into Dolby Digital. This means one single digital cable from PC to receiver. Otherwise, you need a bunch of analog connections. Ugh. No standalone sound card can do it, no other built-in system can do it. I also expect that my next main system will use onboard sound and I'll retire my Audigy card (or put it in the wife's computer, which, let's face it, is sort of the same thing.)
4) I downloaded the latest version of the Windows port of Duke Nukem 3D the other day. Perfect or nearly so. One less reason to worry about DOS any more. Though supposedly the LAN gaming isn't 100% finished yet... but at least a year or two ago, a Windows multiplayer-only port of Blood was basically perfect, so they should be able to handle Duke easily enough.
5) Most every motherboard with onboard sound has headers for a gameport. It's there. Some motherboards include the actual port as well. If not, you can usually pick one up for cheap. But really, unless you're in cuddly love with your old gameport-joystick, dump it and buy a shiny new USB one and be done with it.
1) MS Sidewinder is not a horrible gamepad. Any more than [i]every[/i] gamepad is. I still long for the days of real joysticks.
2) PS2 adapters can be decent if you get the right one. Big S bought one to hook up dance pads to her laptop to play Stepmania, and it appears to work very well (after a little fiddling. Actually, I think a little toggle switch was set wrong.)
3) Onboard audio is usually quite good nowadays. In fact, my home theater PC is going to have the nVidia "Soundstorm", which is on only a few nForce 2 mbs, which dynamically encodes [i]all[/i] audio into Dolby Digital. This means one single digital cable from PC to receiver. Otherwise, you need a bunch of analog connections. Ugh. No standalone sound card can do it, no other built-in system can do it. I also expect that my next main system will use onboard sound and I'll retire my Audigy card (or put it in the wife's computer, which, let's face it, is sort of the same thing.)
4) I downloaded the latest version of the Windows port of Duke Nukem 3D the other day. Perfect or nearly so. One less reason to worry about DOS any more. Though supposedly the LAN gaming isn't 100% finished yet... but at least a year or two ago, a Windows multiplayer-only port of Blood was basically perfect, so they should be able to handle Duke easily enough.
5) Most every motherboard with onboard sound has headers for a gameport. It's there. Some motherboards include the actual port as well. If not, you can usually pick one up for cheap. But really, unless you're in cuddly love with your old gameport-joystick, dump it and buy a shiny new USB one and be done with it.