Acorn Dual Analogue Joysticks

The Acorn analogue joysticks are something to behold. They represent quite possibly everything that you could possibly do wrong when building a device that is entirely dependent of being as ergonomical as possible.

The twin Acorn Analogue joysticks

As you can imagine, after looking at the photo above, the phrase "boxy" comes to mind! The hand grips pay lip service to ergonomic design but even now as a 6'4" tall man with hands that are in proportion with the rest of my body, I find it tricky to grip the joystick because they're just that bit too big to be comfortable.

Using these joysticks can be an ordeal and I suspect that ELITE got a reputation as being hard to dock your ship manually because of these joysticks. Using the Kempston Competition Pro digital joystick or a Voltmace joystick made docking a breeze because they both had auto centering. Having always used the Competition Pro, I never understood people that said docking was hard until I tried it with the Acorn analogue joysticks. They're right, docking in ELITE is hard!

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