My D-SUB9 USB joystick adapter from Retronic Design arrived in the mail today and the first thing I have to say about it is, I kick myself for not ordering myself one sooner! This thing is the perfect accessory for anyone who wants to use their authentic joysticks when playing games on their C64 emulators.

After all of these years not being able to use my favorite joystick (theBOSS) when playing on the PC or TheC64Mini, I'm utterly thrilled to be able to do so now. I've used it on my PC running VICE and my C64Mini and it works just fine. Using it with VICE was dead easy; I just had to change the joystick input from the “keymap” setting to “joystick” and then map the joystick inputs to the UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT directions.

Using it on TheC64Mini is a bit more fiddly, but that's because you need the Mini's joystick plugged in to it in order to work the menus. Also, I think I'll have to make a few adjustments to the .CJM joystick mapping scrips for some of the games to get them seeing the joystick properly. But, overall, the D-SUB9 worked just fine “out of the box” with about three quarters of the games I quickly tried. It's nice and compact, too; nothing left to get in the way.

I'm really glad it works so well. Some games I just can't play very well without using TheBOSS… keyboard keys and TheC64Joystick are just not good enough. The game, “Aliens The Video Game” is one of them. I just can't get by the first stage (the flying down to the planet surface) with using a keyboard on VICE; and I'm not much better with TheC64Joystick. So, again, it was a very satisfying moment for me this afternoon when I made it through that stage on the first try, with TheBOSS. In the words of George Costanza, “I'm back, BABY!”

If you have a favorite joystick from the 8-bit era and want to use it on your emulated C64, I highly recommend you check out the D-SUB9 USB Adapter from Retronic Design. I think it's well worth the $29.99 (Canadian, by the way) price tag. Oh, if you'd like to take advantage of a 15% discount going on right now, be sure to use the promo code: KenSentMe at the shopping cart.

Me and TheBOSS are going to start bossing these games around (again)!!

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