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Presto Change-o! Saitek Cyborg 3D USB
by Kurt ‘Froglips’ Giesselman, European Bureau ChiefInstallation and Setup
The highpoint of my installation was the plug and play aspect of the USB stick and the Saitek Gaming Extensions software. All the work I had done programming my X36 USB was now carried over to my Cyborg 3D USB Gold. It was a simple process to open SGE and add the new stick to an existing configuration,
Add the new controller to exiting profiles
open the GUI for the Cyborg 3D USB Gold, and assign commands to the buttons on my new stick.
All my old command files worked perfectly
The Cyborg 3D USB Gold has four buttons on the base, plus two shift keys that can act as normal buttons or shift keys. There are three buttons on the stick, plus the eight-way POV hat, plus the trigger! The buttons are mapped to the standard Direct Input buttons by default. The full range of SGE programming actions are available on any button or position of the POV hat. This includes cycles of actions, toggled actions, delayed actions, or, on the new soon-to-be-released version of SGE, launching an application or a web site. If you choose to enable the shift keys then each button will have three possible actions depending on whether the left or right shift is depressed. Oddly there were not four possible states with the fourth state being both shift keys depressed.
One thing that I really missed from my X36 was the LED indication for modes. The Cyborg 3D USB Gold’s shift keys support latching. This means that the shift state is engaged the first time the shift key is pressed and not released until the second time the shift key is pressed. As you might expect, in the heat of action one often looses track of whether the shift state is engaged or not. A small LED adjacent to each shift button to indicate shift state would be a welcome addition. I suspect this would be very difficult to implement since the shift latch is implemented in software not hardware like the X36’s mode switch.
I have found it a very flyable stick. The grip, because of its highly adaptable design, is very comfortable. I have become accustomed to the twist rudder action faster than I thought I would. The twist action is OK for jet simulations but frankly is difficult for WW II simulations where the rudder is an important and useful control surface on the aircraft. On a jet, except taxiing with the nose wheel steering, there is little use for the rudder in flight. Rudders, even the very large twin rudders of a Su-27 (Flanker 2.0) or a F/A 18 (DI’s Superhornet or Jane’s F/A 18) have little effect unless the aircraft is near stall speeds. When the stick is combined with a PC Dash2 (or the original PC Dash) the Saitek Cyborg 3D USB Gold is hardly a second class citizen. I find, except for my online squad’s flight night, that I rarely pull out and hook up my new cockpit. Recommended.
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