CD-i member Glen Parsons had this CD-i joystick for sale a while back. It is pretty rare these days, but a true beauty on CD-i. Manufacturer Tecno Plus made these joystick for various formats, but this is the only version that was compatible with CD-i. Philips or a different manufacturer never released a joystick, although Philips had plans and even created a prototype.
When I was younger I was always thrilled to play our PC games with a
true joystick; especially shooters were very suitable to play with this.
Otherwise we had the keyboard to navigate through games, but something
like a gamepad we only got to know when consoles became more popular in
every household. I always found it remarkable that our CD-i never had a
joystick but only came with a thumbstick. As a separate pointing device
you could buy a mouse, a trackerball, even a gamepad, but there was no
joystick. A lot of times later, we discovered that there actually was a
CD-i joystick available, released by a true third party company 'Tecno
Plus'. These products were not sold in The Netherlands, as far as I
know. We also know now that Philips was planning its own joystick on CD-i, but somehow never released it.
So what do we have here? This TP521 Joystick by Tecno Plus is a 'simple'
joystick configuration, which means the joystick purely reacts as a
digital pointing device and it is not pressure sensitive. Joysticks can
offer quite some sensitivity when they have some kind of pressure
sensitivity, but without it, this joystick can navigate a bit roughly
and it is hard to make precise movements. Other than that, it does offer
a 3-speed setting as it was also available on the CD-i touchpad and the
CD-i gamepad by Philips. This speed setting changes the speed of the
pointer, so the higher the speed, the faster the cursor moves over the
screen. In fast paced shooters, like Chaos Control on CD-i, it is a
handy feature to shoot everyone as fast as possible and even in games
like Mad Dog McCree it is a welcome extra, although I still prefer the
mouse to navigate the way I want, it is far more precise. CD-i member
Dynamic-Gaming-Twinz, who owns this beautiful device, comments: "it
is not pressure sensitive. It only has an adjustment for the speed of
the pointer as the picture shows, there are three speeds much like the
other controller peripherals."
- Editor:Dreamon
- Credits: Glen Parsons
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