At least it sure seemed like it.
I just came back after about a year away, and it was not a great year for my peripherals. I used to fly with a Logitech Wingman Extreme and a Belkin Nostromo N50. N50 was nice because it had a throttle wheel in it that worked perfectly and I used the thumbpad directional for a viewhat.
During my year away from AH the N50 went belly-up. I'd come to rely on the Nostromo for FPS games so I got a new one, but I got the newer N52. More buttons and more comfortable, but the throttle has been replaced by a mousewheel. Not only that, but a mousewheel that doesn't appear to be mappable differently than the wheel on my mouse, so it's really like having two things that do the same thing.
My first thought was that I could buy another N50 for flying. Then I thought no, I'll buy another N52 and just put the throttle wheel from the old N50 in it and have my very own custom N52-Flight. Then I thought about my soldering skillz and got frightened.
So what I ended up doing is breaking down and switching from the N52 to the X52. Saitek, that is.
Now the problem: How the heck do you guys track cons with this thing? I'm using the only 8-way hat for the 8 horizontal views, plus an up and a down to get to all of the other vertices. This is how I did it on both of the Nostromos, with the thumb pad (8-way hat) for the horizontal and two of the other buttons for up and down. That setup gets me everywhere I need to be, but now I'm using my right thumb instead of my left and it's really messing me up.
I just noticed in the Profile editor that I can switch Hat 3 (index finger on the throttle) to an 8-way hat instead of a 4-way, so I might try that for horizontal instead. Might seem odd to some of you, but I'm USED TO having that control with my left hand, so maybe it will seem more natural to me. The only thing I can say for certain is that my stats are going to suffer during this transition. My SA has never been great and this is only going to make things worse.
Thanks for listening guys, and I appreciate any feedback.
