deskthority

You've probably seen plenty of gaming peripherals, such as joysticks, steering wheels and pedals, gamepads, obviously keyboards and mice, fighting sticks etc. It's kinda obvious, how any of these are used. However, the 90's were funny times and some really weird input devices were made in that era. One of them is Microsoft SideWinder Strategic Commander of the classic MS' SideWinder series.

What the hell is that? At first, it looks like a huge left-handed mouse. On second sight, it's clear that it isn't a mouse, because it's stationary and the upper part moves like a joystick in just a small radius. You can rotate it a bit to the sides too. In fact, it behaves as a standard joystick as well, software-wise.

There are eight buttons on top, each pair under one finger (the two pairs on the right are better controlled by index fingers though), three thumb buttons and one button and a three-position slider on the base. If I were able to run Win98 drivers on my 2014 GNU/Linux box, I might configure up to 72 commands using these nine buttons on three layers (I guess some of the thumb ones work as modifiers), but nowadays they act as ordinary joystick buttons.

The buttons are poor quality, unfortunately. Overall build-quality is similar to WMO or MTO or other old MS input devices, questionable that is.

According to official specifications, "joystick" twisting and movement and plus/minus should control the camera in strategic games. I don't think it works in any modern RTS, nor still-90's AoE2 that I play to this day; only if you remap the joystick to act as a mouse, but then it would obviously conflict with mouse use and using a joystick to control the graphic cursor is weird in my experience. (I've tried to do so through QJoyPad.)

In the end, I have yet another useless device... a collectible, nothing else.

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Looks pretty cool and like it would be ergonomic though. I have been saving one to use in some other project maybe... I just don't know that kind of project that would be.

The shape is great, I think a bit similar to the ergonomic "handshoe" mouse.

OTOH, the buttons are horrible, but it's nearly impossible to open the case without damaging anything, because one of the two screws on the bottom side of the upper part is horribly placed.

Moreover, I suspect the plastic will quickly get shiny just like the case of e.g. WMO.

I still have a SideWinder in my box with old computer stuff. It has seen a lot of use in my Diablo2 addiction phase.
BTW, you don't need to go back to Win98; drivers are available for Win XP. The nice thing was that you could map keypresses, mouse actions and macros to any button or movement. E.g. back in the days I had a twist of the device mapped to opening the inventory (=pressing i). Simple macros could be recorded on the fly by pressing the Rec button.
Unfortunately, the quality of the buttons was indeed crap, especially the ones on the top required too much force.

Too bad I have only a copy of vista (or rather its server version) and all links to driver downloads I've found were dead.

As far as I understand, special game profiles are basically required to get it to work in games. Because it acts as an ordinary joystick in GNU/Linux, I tried to remap all actions to mouse/keyboard actions. It worked too, but then I just prefer Belkin Nostromo.

A friend of mine who's into flight sims might well have had one of these, back in the day.

He currently has a USB throttle (essentially a 1-axis secondary control) he uses alongside his main joystick. Gotta fly with hands on throttle and stick, you know.