Ultimate HOTAS: CH Fighterstick and Pro Throttle USB
Category : Game Controllers Manufacturer : CH Products
Posted by: Nightmare on 2002-09-25
Introduction
CH Fighterstick and Pro Throttle USB
Introduction
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…(ok, Windows 3.1 and DOS), the PC joystick market was pretty sad. Personally, I went through about 4 or 5 joysticks a week, the little plastic two button jobs would break while I was still calibrating them. There had to be somebody out there who could make a real joystick. A friend of mine with a VERY old Apple got a joystick I had never seen before. It was a CH Products Flightstick Pro. Immediately I could tell it was different from the junk I was used to, it was about 5 times bigger, jet-black, and mean looking. It resembled a stick from a real aircraft. I decided I had to have a CH stick, and a little while later I bought the then brand new CH F-16 Combat stick.
This stick was unbelievable, it made my pitiful opponents in Activision’s Mech Warrior 2 and EA’s U.S. Navy Fighters weep as I ripped them apart with pulse lasers from my Dire Wolf, and AIM-120 AAMRAMS from my F-14 Tomcat. The Combat stick had (and CH sticks still have these) a third dial in addition to the X and Y axis trim dials on the base, which could be used as a Z axis for throttle control. When I decided I wanted more, I added a Pro Throttle to the mix, and things got really interesting. The Pro Throttle, in addition to adding another menagerie of buttons and hat switches, allowed each of its buttons as well as the Combat stick’s buttons to act as keyboard commands. Now even old games that only supported 4 button joysticks, like Tie Fighter, could be brought completely under my control. The Rebel Alliance didn’t stand a chance.
Why all this personal history? Well to prove a point. The gameport F-16 Combat stick and Pro Throttle I have, which are I can’t even remember how many years old, work as well as the day I took them out of the box. The price of entry may be a bit high, but put simply, these sticks are built to last. Unfortunately however, Microsoft took the ability to program through the keyboard port out of the NT based operating systems, which includes 2000 and XP. When I made the switch, my beloved Combat stick and Pro Throttle couldn’t come with me. I asked the very nice people at CH for some new USB models, and they sent me their current top of the line setup, the USB Fighterstick and Pro Throttle, which is what we’ll be looking at today.
