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Comment by jasonjamerson | Hacker News Reader

A mouse for Descent? We used to play with both hands on the keyboard- look, slide, and spin on the number pad, move, fire, etc. on the far left side. We're we alone?

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You weren't alone, but we just used more hands.

I usually did navigation, and my grade school aged son did the shooting while sitting on my lap.

Now he's 33 and I'm 64, we'll have to switch places.

Hello old me! :) My 6 year old son broke two spacebars firing the Phoenix Cannon one summer...

bwahahaha, I love that!

The Circle of Descent continues....

I would sometimes play “co-op“ with my little brother, navigating with a flight stick and the number pad while he managed weapons and firing. It’s fun to see decades later that we weren’t the only ones to play Descent this way!

I did this with my boy too, it was so much fun and great bonding over easily understood teamwork!

That’s the way I started but eventually used two FlightSticks. Banking movement with one hand (forward, backward, sideways), rotating around two axis with the other (barrel roll, pitch), and the thumb sticks I used for up/down and left/right. Although I might misremember some details. There was a time when I really wanted to add a pair of pedals, too. Ah, to have that much time to spare again.

I play Descent I and II today, on period hardware. How do you hook up two joysticks and have them be used in the game?

Ouch. "period hardware". That does it - I'm officially old.

I'm 62. I'm period hardware.

look into "period hardware" which is itself a "dual joystick" (typically literally sold for use in descent). it's a gimmick that sold i.e. why have one joystick when you can have two. Then you should just have a single i/o interface to your MIDI game port.

The Macintosh version of the FlightStick had an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) plug that had a port on the other end so you could plug in another device. It’s been 30 years. Do you think I might misremember? Maybe it was a FlightStick and a Saitek joystick? If you are running the original game on period hardware and tell me that the software wouldn’t know how to tell two different joysticks apart regardless of which type, then I guess I’d have to admit that there’s something fishy with my memory.

most people nowadays play on source ports (D1x-Redux is the current top of the heap) that support multiple controllers.

Yeah flightstick was the way to play Descent, I used a Logitech Wingman Light. Never tried two sticks, always controlled strafing with keyboard

The wingman was amazing. Lot's of leeway and light and smooth. It seemed to have been built for environments like descent, where your fighter swooshed gracefully through space under any 3d angle.

THE way to play Descent was with a Spaceball Avenger. I was a beta tester for one, holding it in your hand was like your brain interfacing directly with the ship. Sadly the sensors broke over the years and I'm settling for joysticks.

I dug around in my archives and found this post, someone is running Descent in DOSBox on an XP machine and using two USB joysticks and xpadder to set it up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/zcycoq...

No mouse here, only carpal tunnel. I tried playing a few years back and my right hand was locked up within a few minutes.

Two joysticks ruled.

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