VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 18:49:35 CDT

Dear Jill,
  VMD is pretty Joystick agnostic, it should work with almost any
2-axis joystick, and can work with the more sophisticated ones, though
it does not make use of all of the potential axes. Let us know if you
have a specific question about any particular kind of joystick. And yes,
they support translation, rotation, and zooming.

If you're serious about getting a better input device, I highly recommend
the Spaceball and Magellan devices, which are often available at very low
prices on Ebay. They are both far superior to a regular joystick, and can
often be had for about $50, sometimes less, if you get them used.

Since 3dconnexion now owns both devices, a single Windows driver runs
either device, I assume that the driver works fine on XP, though I haven't
personally tried yet:
  http://www.3dconnexion.com/

Here's an example search for Spaceballs on Ebay:
  http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&query=spaceball&ht=1&ebaytag1=ebayreg&CATEGORY0=160&SortProperty=MetaEndSort

I see several Spaceball 2003 models on Ebay right now for $25.00, that's a
really good price.

  John

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 03:46:29PM -0700, Jill Vickery wrote:
> I am running VMD on Windows XP with Eye3D premium. I see that joysticks may
> be supported by VMD. I cannot seem to find a list of the joysticks that are
> supported and if they allow translation, rotation, and zooming.
> Jill 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078