In my 486 I sometimes use the speed compensation offered by the GUS gameport. It is neat to have when playing older games (mostly from the 1980s), the issue vanished in the early 1990s when programmers started to time their joystick routines properly.

One game that usually requires a speed-compensated port, at least on a 486, is Out of this World/Another World. I prefer to play it with a Gravis Gamepad, and the game will not respond to directionals appropriately on a Sound Blaster Pro gameport with any 10Khz sound option. It will respond just fine with a Sound Blaster 16 gameport, so a speed sensitive gameport is still useful. The joystick was not recommended, but the game is much, much easier to play with a gamepad.

So the SB 16 has a speed-compensated gameport but the SB Pro doesn't have one?

I tried Jazz Jackrabbit on my 486DX2-50 with Ultrajoy and without. No difference.

Not all the SB16's had a speed adjusted game port 🙁 I had to buy my first ACM while I still had a SB16 installed. Don't know which SB16 I had, though, so I can't give you details.

As far as that goes, while researching MB's, and taking into account that the Thrustmaster ACM's effectiveness is limited on faster systems, I came across a BIOS setting some motherboards have that sounded interesting where this is concerned. Does anyone have a board that allows you to set the 8-bit & 16-bit I/O recovery time? From what I'm reading, they add an extra delay in ISA I/O polling. Would this be effective in adjusting the game port speeds (the 8-bit recovery setting that is?) My current MB doesn't have that option, or I'd dig out my old flight stick and start testing myself. I'm also not sure if the AWE32 had that problem or not.

I have one, it's a Socket 7 board though: the Asus TX97-XE

The 8-bit & 16-bit I/O recovery time settings help some games properly detect and use both my Sound Blaster Pro 2 and GUS ACE sound cards, otherwise they're not detected or unexpected freezes/lockups will occur. I also use a Gravis Gamepad Pro connected to the SB Pro 2's joystick port; when I had both settings at 1, it would not calibrate at all with some games like Duke Nukem 2, Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit. After changing both to their current settings of 8 and 2, joystick calibration worked just fine once again. I don't have an analog flight stick to test, however.

Another Socket 7 board that has these settings is the Shuttle HOT-569. Used to own one in the late 90's, but no longer have it.

Cool, it does help 😀 I imagine that an ACM in conjunction with that would work best.... probably. Maybe not enough to make up for a Ghz+ system, but who knows 😀

The way I see it, gameports have kept up with faster machines. But if you put an old gameport (SB Pro for example) into a newer machine you might run into problems.

You should be able to disable most resources on a newer card and just use it as a gameport.