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2025.03.16

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To help with the testing of multiplayer, I made a very minor investment in this Sidewinder game controller from 2002, which, incidentally is when work on X-Bomber the Game started.

My Xbox One controller has a ludicrously big USB wireless adapter to make it work with Windows, although there is a smaller adapter that was released a bit later.

It was irritating: tweaking the game for 10-15mins, finding that the controller had powered itself off to save battery, powering it on, waiting for it to connect, restarting the game to make it detect the controller etc ...

The other thing is that the Xbox controller is a poor controller for playing shoot-em-ups in Windows.
The part of the controller that controls X/Y movement is the analogue stick on the left, which is not as fast as a direction pad and has a vague, wobbly feel to it.
The Xbox controller does have a d-pad but it presents itself in Windows as 4 fire buttons, which makes it useless.

At the same time, the triggers underneath present as rudders, so you can't map those as buttons either.
The shoulder buttons are actual buttons but they're in such an uncomfortable place that that doesn't really work either.

So, the old Sidewinder roasts it in all those areas and USB is just a lot less hassle.

This one was £1.65 on eBay, with it's packaging. 
It looks like it's never been used.

So, if you have the urge to run X-Bomber in co-operative 2-player mode, then I suggest saving yourself some money and maybe getting one of these.

I once had the original version of this controller, which had the serial cable, rather than USB.
It was black rather than dark grey, with greyish-green buttons, rather than black ones.
There are one or two other slight differences as well but it brings back memories of playing Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy and Fury3 with the old one.

One thing that my daughter remarked about is that the packaging is "so cool", which is interesting and very true.
It's much more exciting than the bland, sterile and unimaginative packaging of Microsoft's current gaming hardware.

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