wierd_w wrote on 2026-04-23, 07:19:

There IS a driver for that, but I have not tested it. https://www.bretjohnson.us/ […]
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megatron-uk wrote on 2026-04-23, 07:10:

Joystick is probably one of the biggest sticking points.

Some (read: very few) older laptops do have a combined joystick/midi port, and of course with those you can use a real joystick. With usb-only laptops you may be able to get one of the usb enablers to detect the chip and something like Bret Johnsons USB tools which can map USB controllers to keyboard input.

But there's no way to use an analogue usb joystick with dos, natively, that I am aware of.

There IS a driver for that, but I have not tested it.
https://www.bretjohnson.us/

Naturally, a "Joystick port" joystick would need a HID class adapter to physically be connectable via USB.
I remember looking to see if that X401U could work with his USB HID Storage class driver, and found that it was not usable, since this thing is so budget, they cut USB1.1 hardware support. It only has OHCI and EHCI, not UHCI. (I wanted it for troubleshooting reasons. I have unusual mouse input if using the "Microsoft Mouse" driver for win3x--this is svardos afterall-- but found that switching it to the Logitech one fixes everything. The builtin legacy peripherals bios routines work fine knowing this caveat.)

So, I guess it has 2 strikes against it. It was exceedingly rare to even *FIND* a gameport joystick port on a laptop from the days of yore anyway though.

Coming late to the game, have you checked this YouTube channel RETROBECANES? It reviews a bunch of laptops with game port and even with wave table audio. https://youtu.be/tRU7DBwV7yg?is=vcyTieqKnN-5BBEy