Cheap and Space Saving Virtual On Twin Stick Alternatives

AnnA Ayms · May 23, 2021

The first 2 Virtual On's are some of my all time favorite games. The whole reason I got a Sega Saturn was for the port but I never got the Twinsticks. I'm one of those rare cases that preferred the game itself to the control gimmick. For a while I even frequently played the Dreamcast port emulated on a phone with touch controls. A little over a year ago I literally had a dream about finding the Twinsticks in a store so sometime after waking decided to look online to see what they went for but decided the price and practicality weren't worth it (and this from someone with a Steel Battalion Controller) so I "rigged" up the below.

The Logitech Attack 3 Joystick is symmetrical so no handedness issues that many joysticks seem to impose and they are pretty cheep. A year or so ago I didn't have trouble seeing ones on Ebay for under $20 (US) but a quick search now and they are more like $20-25 so ~$50 for 2 (that is with shipping included/priced in). Although as individual USB joysticks they can be used in other ways too. The Xbox 360 ports of Operation Moongate and Oratorio Tangram are some of, if not the best versions of those games (I'm not sure if the PS4 version was released nor how well it plays so can't comment there but if anyone has info that would be cool) and Xenia (the Xbox 360 emulator) handles both games pretty well. Operation Moongate sometimes has (as of the last version I tried a couple months ago) some color palette issues but I honest think that makes it more visually interesting at times. I used JoyToKey (although there are a bunch of other programs that can do the same thing) to map the Joysticks to Xenia's Keyboard controls. The Twinsticks were always purely digital controls so there is no loss of finesse re-mapping it like this. I also used some double sided tape to hold them down. This setup also works with RetroArch and the Flycast core so the Naomi Arcade version (5.66) and the Dreamcast port can also be played this way. I didn't try but suspect the Saturn port could also be configured.