Hardware hacking question - Game ports
 

I just remembered one of my slowly-ticking-over projects and took an interest in it for a few hours. If I do that approximately 5,000 more times I might finish it at some point :) Anyway, this is mainly a hardware hack initially - I'm building an input device that has 16 analogue inputs (plus multiple digital ones, but they're the easy part).

With a proper game port you get 4 analogue inputs and since the support for game ports from a software development point of view is excellent I'd like to use four of these. They're also unusually easy to attach to from an electronics point of view, which is essential for me because I'm a dangerous idiot with a soldering iron... I understand that it is possible to have multiple game ports in a single machine, but what I'd like to do is use USB game ports like these:

http://www.cables2u.co.uk/product_in...roducts_id=185

Does anyone here have any experience of doing something like this, or anything with game ports, particularly on Linux? I'm planning to use Linux::Input::Joystick (or Linux::Joystick; I haven't looked at them in great detail) to read the joysticks from Perl initially though in practice I might find I need to use C to get the speed I need for my purposes on my (frankly) crufty old hardware.

This is nothing directly to do with game programming but I'm sure that there will be parallels.

Any advice would be appreciated, especially if anyone knows for sure whether it's possible to hook four of these USB game ports up to a USB hub and expect Linux to see them as /dev/js0..3.

Many thanks in advance!

Hmm, guess I was right when I thought this was too obscure a thing to want to do :) I've decided to gamble and have invested in four of these USB game ports - less than £20 ($40) on eBay from Germany so I figured it was worth the gamble. My concern is that the machine will only see one of them ... but I'll post here again and confirm whether it works on the offchance that someone is searching these forums for just this information in the future.