External Joystick ?!?!?

[PolloLoco]

I wish I'd seen this thread before - I could have given you a quick review before you committed to buying it.

I bought the same joystick. It works well in general - but really only shines in games you play in portrait mode. Then you can hold the 6700 between the wings of the gamepad.

Playing other emulators, like SNES & Genesis - it's usually preferrable to play in landscape mode to get the most out of the screen. The only way I've done this is by closing up the gamepad and playing independently of the 6700 - IE, my 6700 is sitting on my desk. Otherwise, I'd actually rigged a couple of PDA clamps together to use the joystick as a single unit. Two clamps are glued together, the 6700 is held by one clamp, the joystick in the other. It works ok, but the weight makes the whole assembly unbalanced.

Program wise, there's slight lag in button presses - but most of it goes away when you use the updated drivers you can download online. The joystick requires a program to be running in the background while you play. This causes a minor problem because you now have the 6700 keyboard fix (to allow multipresses), the joystick program, and finally the emulator you're running. RAM gets low quick. With WM5, if your emulator required too many resources (NEO GEO especially), the other programs could get shut down. So all of a sudden the game keeps going but your joystick's not responding until you reinitiate the driver program. I haven't seen this with WM6 yet, but I haven't had enough practice to ensure that.

Finally, the build quality is not great. I had the directional pad slip out, and finally the tabs broke. It'll still work, but occasionally the pad will pop out on it's own.

Overall, I'd say it's worth the $40 total I spent - but not much more. You can find them onsale online every once in a while by searching for "bluetooth gamepad" in froogle.

An ideal gamepad would connect via USB to prevent loss of resources via bluetooth, but I've been told that's impossible because the USB port is client, not host.