Cheap CH Products Rudder Pedals (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of CH Products Rudder Pedals

XP User
I got these pedals 2nd hand, and have only begun using them. For those reasons, and because I've got little experience with computer rudder pedals in general, I'm not going to actually review the item qualitive wise. However, XP users who don't really want something more but are willing to pay for it only because they think this product is incompatible with their late-model systems should think twice.
To begin with, these are CH's basic pedals. On real aircraft, the heels of each pedal are used for steering, while the upper half (the toes) are actually used for breaking. I've heard that Pro-Pedals will actually simulate this dual movement. However, these pedals do not - simulating only their use as rudders. Nevertheless, for a guy like me who's been "flying" sim games since 1986, I welcomed any chance to "get my feet off the ground" so to speak. These pedals hook up to a gameport, rather than USB. USB would have been more preferable, sure, but my other 2nd-hand gaming peripherals (a Thrustmaster WCS/FCS set-up) weren't USB either, and I'm not sure that you can play games using multiple-controllers that are USB and non-USB at the same time. If I stuck to my guns and insisted on USB, I'd probably have to junk my other otherwise satisfactory Thrustmaster controls, tossing out the money and the heartbreak spent to get them and get them to work the way I wanted.
Now here's the hard part. After getting them home I learnt of CH's decree that 1) that you needed to hook these up to a 2-port game port and 2) they won't work under XP. Though I already had a twin-port game card (an ACM card, if you must know) lying around, it was an old ISA card, and wouldn't fit on my P4's motherboard. Motherboards have long since completely abandoned the ISA bus for PCI. Twin-port game cards were themselves a bit of a novelty and never caught on string enough or for long enough for somebody to make one in PCI standard. Ready to kick myself, and wondering how much it was going to cost me to get USB for everything ..., I decided to hook it up anyway - and it worked! The pedals come with two connectors - a male connector that hooks up to your game port, and a female connector that your primary controller hooks into. My primary controller also had a keyboard pass-through for a separate throttle-controller. Once the joystick is plugged into the throttle, the throttle is connected to the computer through both the keyboard pass and through a second line that plugged into the rudders. I knew it had at least partially worked when I booted up and the keyboard till worked. WinXP recognized the rudder almost immediately (first, I had to "remove" whatever game-controller setup was already in use on the game controller control-panel. WinXP had no problem detecting the rudders as long as they were detected before the other controls, an inexplicable though otherwise tolerable quirk). So far, I've "flown" in both FS2000 and the original Combat Flight Simulator, and found performance satisfactory in both.
Would USB be better? Perhaps. The point is that simmers owning old components but upgrading to USB-PCI machines like mine shouldn't be so quick to junk otherwise reliable controllers because they won't be able to get gameport controllers to run on their newer systems.