Another friend handed me this huge joystick one day, after explaining he had found it in the trash, but thought it would still work. What I got was this:
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It turns out Sony had released this for use with their Playstation port of Descent 2! I'd never seen one, so I poked around, bought a PSX to USB adapter, and 10 minutes later I'm flying with it! Talk about insane... the retail Linux D3 box is for scale. Yes, that's what I play it on. The base is over 16 inches wide.
The next trick was getting direct-weapon button mapping, which as far as I know isn't possible within the game. I picked up a USB numpad for $10, used a free key-remapping program, and velcroed it to the joystick... now I have everything mapped!
Now if I could just learn to fly again. Anyone else use anything like this?