FreeD Wireless Joystick

FreeD

**Manufactured By: Pegasus Technologies Ltd.

Retail Price: $79 **

Review Date:03-20-99

I love new, innovative technology. I had a mouse, floppy drive and joystick for my Commodore 64 in the early 80s before they were "standard" computer equipment. These new technologies made my computer use more effective and fun. The FreeD promises wireless control and it does deliver just that. However, the method of delivery is one that is plagued with problems.

As with any new concept you must allow time for adjustment to a new way of doing things. I gave the FreeD over a weeks worth of my computing time. Not only does it serve as a joystick, but you can enable it as a mouse to work along side of your system mouse. I thought this would be a useful feature, especially when detaching the transmitter from the joystick base and strapping it to your index finger with the provided strap. You could be typing along and perform mouse functions without straying too far from the keyboard.

Even with the latest driver set from the Pegasus website the FreeD has a latency problem. Its translation of movements from your hand to the screen are sluggish at best. Even with continued practice accuracy is difficult to achieve. My other criticism of the FreeD is the design of the receiver. The receiver is a L shaped bracket that hangs over the top of your monitor. The box states that it works with any size monitor. The L bracket has signal receivers at the top left, top right and bottom left corners of the bracket. Transmitter (joystick) movement is detected in an area roughly 2 feet away from these points and diminishes in area as the distance increases.

On a 14 or 15 inch monitor the design may be fine. On a 17" or larger monitor the active area is skewed to the placement of the receiver. On my 19" monitor the receiver extended about 2/3 of the way across the top and 1/2 the way down. The transmitter only worked well in the upper right portion of the space in front of my monitor. The issue quickly became visibility. I needed to hold my hand with the transmitter in a way that blocked the image on the screen.

Features -

• Wireless
• 2 buttons

System Requirements-

Serial port, DOS or Windows 3.x/95

Price -

At the MSRP of $79 the FreeD is one of the worst "bang for buck" controllers available. You can easily find them through on-line closeout vendors for ~$15.

Performance -

As a game controller the FreeD has many limitations. First it only has 2 buttons. Most games barely get by with 4 buttons and 8 or more is preferred with programmability almost a must. The FreeD offers no out-of-game programmability. It does come with a few pre-programmed configurations for games that offer maximized usage of the axis's and buttons but the games are OLD (Descent II, Quake I, Doom, etc.). The latency and lack of accuracy will frustrate and annoy you.

Using the mouse function is not much better. The FreeD software allows you to use it in dual mouse (still keeping your system mouse active) or primary mode (using only the FreeD). I could not get the dual mode to stick. As soon as I used my system mouse the FreeD stopped functioning. Have I mentioned latency and lack of accuracy?

Setup -

Setup is pretty easy. There are only three parts to the FreeD controller- The receiver, the transmitter and the handle. The receiver sets atop your monitor and is plugged into a free serial port. The transmitter can than be strapped to your index finger or mounted on the handle like in the graphic above.

The drivers and test utilities come on a single floppy disk and install easily (new ones are available from the Pegasus website and were used for the test). Restart the system and the FreeD is ready to use.

**Software -

**The drivers and utilities provided for the FreeD load a game controller configuration, mouse use tab and a few test/practice utilities to aquatint you with the function of the FreeD.

Documentation -

I cannot really comment on the content of the manual provided with the FreeD because the package I received contained a manual written entirely in German. The manual appears to go into great depth on how to setup and use the controller but for all I know it could have said bad things about my mother.

Overall Rating -

The FreeD is not a recommended controller. The concept is grand but the implementation is poor at best. Yes it functions, just not well. For the money you could grab yourself a feature packed joystick AND quality mouse. No, they won't be wireless but they will work.