![]() ![]() Using a collection of small GUI apps included with the part that handled negotiating with parallel ports, you could (often after several harried attempts, disconnecting every other joystick from the computer, and locking them in a separate room) define a virtual joystick that would appear alongside your other “real” joysticks in Windows, and populate that definition with inputs from any other physical input device Windows could recognize. “What's that? You want to make button 3 of joystick 1 jump, and button 8 of joystick 2 duck?! What are you, crazy? NO!” the games would shout, that or stare blankly off into the distance as you mashed the forbidden button whatever you were actually trying to accomplish, you'd inevitably shut the game down, open your Game Device properties, be thankful you weren't crazy when all your input devices worked just fine within their own control panes, and eventually either give up in disgust or discover PPJoy. Then as now, most games include gamepad/joystick support and a configuration screen to set everything up, but just about any game that isn't a flight sim will adamantly refuse to allow mixing of inputs from multiple sources. ![]() People definitely used it for that, but presumably because some of them intended to wire in two controllers or use a “real” gamepad in conjunction, it helpfully included a feature that saw it reach a wider user base: a virtual joystick driver. Standing for Parallel Port Joystick, this painfully kludgey but still impressively useful bit of Windows 2000-era software was originally designed to allow enterprising hardware hackers a way to plug a crudely rewired console gamepad into a parallel port and have the resulting monstrosity function like a “real” joystick under Windows. ![]() If you were like the rest of us, you used PPJoy. ![]() If you were lucky, the software in question either allowed for liberal remapping entirely according to your whim or you were a principle coder on said software and could eventually make it do whatever you needed from it. In these interesting virtual travels, you may have even needed to convince a video game or some other software to accept inputs from two or more of these wacky devices simultaneously. As a VR enthusiast, chances are good you've had occasion to play with a few weird or non-standard controllers in your day - cyberpucks, flex sensor gloves, head trackers, whatever. ![]()
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