Hi to all: I’ve got two laptops dedicated to retrogaming, I owe a couple of joysticks with the DB15 gameport connector; the laptops both doesn’t have the gameport/midi port, one of them has the serial rs-232, to the other I’m thinking to get a PCMCIA or CARDBUS serial rs-232 port card; does a serial rs232 db9 female to usb female adapter, connected to gameport db15 to usb adapter, requires an O.S. usb enabled and usb drivers or It works with Windows 95, DOS and Windows 3.11 f.w.?
Hello, and welcome.
I’m pretty sure if USB is involved the you need an OS which supports USB. It’s a pretty complicated protocol.
I don’t feel optimistic that you can make any use of an rs-232 serial port to connect your joysticks, even if you can find some chain of adaptors which allow you connect them: serial communications are quite different from what joysticks use.
I think you might need to ask elsewhere, perhaps a retrogaming community, perhaps stackexchange or reddit. But your question, I think, should be more like “how can I connect joysticks to a laptop with no gameport connecter”. I think it’s always better to state your problem, not your best guess at a solution. (I could be wrong: sometimes suggesting the wrong solution will get results.)
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Maybe with FreeDos and “Windows 95 with USB support”, or with “Windows 95 and Microsoft Plus! (with USB support)”?
I’m not sure how exactly this is supposed to work. – I’m not a PC gamer, but as far as I know the gameport includes analog signals. The gameport to USB adapter would have to generate digital signals from these, and the input would be packed into a USB stream.
The USB to serial adapter on the other hand includes a processor and the OS requires a driver in order to talk to this specific chip set if you want to send serial via USB. The expectation that the adapter would just forward the USB stream to serial may be not how this works. However, if this would work like this, you’d now receive USB via serial and require a USB stack on the receiving end in order to decode this and to reroute this to a virtual gameport.
I may have got this entirely wrong, but if this is how it is expected to work, I’m rather skeptical.
FreeDos and “Windows 95 with USB support” supports only USB pendrives or other hardware too?
I think WIN95 with USB support supports also other USB hardware like an external DVD drive. But probably not every (modern) hardware (missing drivers, speed/compatibility issues etc).
I’m also very skeptical as I had bad experience with laptops and WIN95. (Hardware detection, screen resolution, memory + sound issues etc). So many games won’t run. I posted it elsewhere.
I think you just have to try, but better use a tower/desktop PC.
If I understand right, what you are planning is:
laptop with serial - serial - usb serial female adapter - -usb - gameport USB to DB15 - DB15 joystick
This will not work.
Not a matter of USB support in the OS on the laptop (there is no USB connection there, but serial and that will work) so the other replies in this thread do not apply.
But the two devices coupled with USB, the USB serial and the gameport USB, are both slaves. And slaves do not talk to each other, a master-slave is required. And that is missing in your proposal.
And then the games you want to play do work only with a gameport DB15 joystick, not something via serial.
You may have luck finding a PCMCIA Sound card for a laptop, that may have a DB15 gameport. They did exist in the old days.
This is a sound proposal (oh, the pun), I was thinking of PCMCIA as well.
It doesn’t work neither if I buy an USB Joystick, and eliminate the DB15 to USB adapter? (I don’t understand which is master, and which is slave)
No, will not work. You also ignore the fact your games talk to gameport DB15 devices, not to serial joysticks.
USB devices are masters (like PC’s) or slaves (like the USB gameport or serial USB adapter). Masters tell slaves what to do (sorry for the political incorrect terminology, but that is what the industry calls it!). Slaves can not talk to slaves.
USB actually uses the term “host” for the bus-controlling end, and “device” for the end that is granted access by the host. USB OTG additionally uses the terms “A-device” and “B-device”, in part because the roles of host and power provider (which are unified for non-OTG systems) are not as clear-cut.
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I wonder what joystick DOS games you want to play. I think there were mainly flight simulators or the like using analog joysticks. And as you need many other keys, you better use just the keyboard. I had troubles in the 90s with calibrating the cheap joysticks.
But I guess you want to play arcade games via emulation.
I think you now have to use USB joysticks anyway.
I have an USB arcade stick myself, but was never happy with that. The switch is too slow.
And on Raspberry Pi it wasn’t really supported, at least ~2 years ago (Retropie, using different MAME ports).
Retro gaming is best on original hardware, but then you usually don’t have comfort of modern hardware like USB.
What about Windows 95 games?
Similar. (I don’t understand what you mean).
The earliest Win95 versions didn’t support USB.
And the analog joysticks were always poor, at least that is my experience.
And not all games supported joysticks.
Originally, PCs weren’t designed for gaming.
You can’t compare it with home computers or consoles and their digital joysticks.
Today, it’s different. But we are talking about retro.
The games were also different, but depends on the genre.
I think the games and the ideas were much better then. Mainly the graphics were enhanced.
USB was released in 1996, Win95 was too early for this.
(The first main line computer featuring USB out of the box was Apple’s bondy blue G3 line, as I remember it. And this wasn’t to everyone’s gusto.)
However, you could upgrade your Win95 box by a USB card and there were drivers for these. Eventually, this was all integrated into the standard package, but this didn’t happen instantly.
Amusingly, an early IBM brochure for the 5150 did show the PC as a family machine with the kid playing computer games on the family TV. (The 5150 did have a TV and a casette port and started up in BASIC, if there was no OS to be loaded from a drive. So, actually very much like a home computer, just that the price was a bit different.) No joystick though on this image…
(IBM, 1982. Still from a LGR video, https://youtu.be/T3EJmcZkFms )
Somewhere in a binder I still have my WIN95 OSR2 upgrade disk that essentially turned Win95 into Win98. I got quite a bit of use out of it, since in the late 90s I was spending a lot of time trashing my hard drive doing irresponsible things with Slackware (in addition to Win95’s own tendency to trash the hard drive for basically no reason!).