USB Joystick adapter is here!

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by lukevanoort

I'm curious how hard this would be for IFI to implement, along with the cheaper RS232 adapter, it seems like a good middle ground between those that want USB and those that wish to stay with the gameport. Just adding something like a set of DIP switches to determine whether a serial or gameport device is plugged in and having the OI's microcontroller just break up the serial packets into the various variables and sending those to the RC doesn't seem too complex to me,

Remember, IFI is a business. They need to look at such things with a business perspective (not to say they don't do things for the "good of the community", but they need to be smart about how they spend their money too). As an extremely rough guess, it would at least a staff-month (and probably a lot more) to make this change. As software projects go, that IS a small change, but just think of what that would cost IFI. 1/12 of the cost of an employee for a year (which is a lot higher than just their salary - health benefits, etc. add up). This amounts to many thousands of dollars. How are they going to recoup this? Is it going to help them sell more OIs? Not really, since we'll have to use them one way or another anyway.

One thing that students here will learn when they get out of college is that engineering time is expensive. Even "simple" changes can cost a company lots of money. Every feature or tweak or neat thing you want to do to a product that's in development will cost money. Businesses have to evaluate the business case for each of these changes and determine whether it will pay off or not.