I set up Descent II on my K62/500 and went through a bunch of D2X-Rebirth versions to figure out the latest one that would run. 0.56 seems to work really well, using MesaFX 6.2 for OpenGL support on the Voodoo3. I can even play at 1280x1024(!) and hit the 60FPS limiter if there's not too much action going on.

However, if JOYSTICK support is enabled, I get these huge inconsistent slowdowns and multi-second long pauses in-game, which makes it nearly unplayable. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. With the joystick disabled it goes away & I can play totally fine using the mouse (well, trackball on this system.) I tried with the joystick & mouse enabled simultaneously, and with the joystick on its own - same result.

I'm running a standard analog stick (Logitech Wingman Extreme) through the gameport of my Turtle Beach Montego II, which has a specific driver (the docs call it an "accelerated" gameport.) The OS is 98SE with all the drivers & DirectX 9 installed, no KernelEx or other extenders.

Anyone know what's going on? Is there a way to fix this?