One of the most common questions is about problems getting your Sidewinder (or Gravis) to work with emulators such as MAME and ZSNES which claim to support the pads officially but when you enter the appropriate command they are not recognised. This usually happens in Windows or in the DOS box.

There is quite and easy explanation for this. The Windows drivers, and the drivers provided by the emulator conflict. Therefore only one of them can be loaded at one time. To make your Sidewinder(or Gravis) operational change to the joystick panel in your settings menu and remove the pads from it. This will remove the drivers Windows uses for these. If you now start the emulator and use the appropriate command your joystick should work

Sometimes after changing between several games your joy pad might not be recognised again. There are two ways to solve is problem: either start a new game without joystick support, exit that game and then restart a game with joystick support, or change to your joystick panel again, add the joy pad, click OK, then re-enter the panel and remove it again.

In Mame32 make sure to uncheck both Direct Input cases and check "use joystick" under "Input devices".

A second solution to any possible problems with Sidewinder or Gravis game pad detection if nothing else helps is to use the software to create profiles. Both pads are supported by such software. What it does is to emulate keystrokes whenever you push a button or the directional pad on your joy pad. Check your emulator which keys it is using for directions and buttons and then map these keys to your pad using the software. Then start your emulator without joystick support. The emulator will then read the joystick input as if it was keyboard input. This is very helpful on emulators which do not support joy pads or when nothing else helps with an emulator that should support your joy pad.

The only drawback is, that in some cases the emulator might have difficulties reading two keystrokes at the same time when they are sent from your game pad. This means that for example you can only either fire or move but not both at the same time. (Note: It might not be necessary to emulate keystrokes for the directional commands. Only use the buttons and leave the directional pad alone, then load the Sidewinder of Gravis pad as a generic 2 or 4 button pad. This allows you to work around the drawback of inefficient simultaneous button detection)

An advantage is that you can use this for games like pacman which are sometimes more difficult to control than they used to be because modern joy pads have eight directions and in the old days the arcade joysticks for these games only used four directions. If you only map the four directions to your joy pad and not the diagonals this can make it easier to use.

How to create profiles (check Useful Files for profiles I made earlier :-))

To use Game Device Profiler to map keyboard commands, follow these steps:

1) In Game Device Profiler, click the device to which you are mapping a keyboard command, and then click New Profile in "File"

2) Name your profile e.g. Mame, ZSNES, etc.... press "enter"

3) Press a button on the SideWinder 3D Pro or SideWinder game pad or use the mouse to click the button on the screen, the button will be highlited in the righthandside tab. Click the field next to it, then click on the black empty space in the box which opens up. Press the key on the keyboard you want to map to that button (these should be the keys listed in the readme.txt of your emu as ingame control keys, or the ones you have configured to be used by your emu). When you press this button in the game, the key is activated. 4) Do this for all the buttons. It is of advantage to leave the directional pad as is and to use the Sidewinder as a regular 2 or 4 button pad (-joy 2 option in Mame). Only map the directional controls for emus which have no joystick support at all!

5) Make sure to enable the profile for the correct pad by ticking it in the list of all available profiles!

NOTE: You cannot map the Windows key on keyboards that support this key (such as the Microsoft Natural Keyboard).

How to connect a spinner and mouse without a switchbox

This works for the "Twisty Spinner" with the DOS version of MAME and probably most other DOS emus, too. If you have a PS2 mouse you can connect your Spinner to the first serial port. Run a hardware detection routine from your control panel and it should be picked up. Configure it and presto, you've got two devices controlling the same mouse pointer. The "Twisty Spinner" will work as a horizntal spinner sort of thing while the mouse retains all of it's functions. No more plugging your mouse in and out for a quick game of Arkanoid :-) (Thanks to Kevin Butler for the tip)

How to connect and use two mice on one system

Very handy for two player trackball games such as marble madness!

You can use a splitter device to run both mice off the same port, or:

WIth the Microsoft mouse driver, you can have both a PS/2 and serial port mouse functional
at the same time in Win9x.

1. Install PS/2 mouse, let it detect and configure. Verify it works.
2. Shut down. Add serial mouse. Start up. (May work w/out shutdown/startup)
3. Windows will not detect the serial mouse. You must go to "add new hardware" and let it search for it. It will then detect the serial mouse.
4. Voila, two functional mice.

Caveats: Only works with the right MS driver and fairly generic mice (most are). If your mouse or pointing device uses a custom driver only, it probably won't work.
This information can be found and expanded upon by perusing the Microsoft Win9x Resoure Kit. I can dig up references if someone really wants me to :)

NOTE: You can also run both at once using the Logitech driver - even in DOS. LMOUSE DUAL will cause it to look for both devices.

Thnaks to Saint and Videoman for those tips!