I'm looking for a budget joystick for casual play. I still have an old Trust Predator Pro 3D, but unfortunately it has pin connection, and my laptop only has USB.

Does anyone recommend SPEEDLINK PHANTOM HAWK Joystick? It's more toward arcade games with the occasional flight sim. (Star Wars Rogue Squadron, Incoming, possibly Star Wars x-wing series) do you think it's a good enough joystick for such?

Thanks for the help

I KNOW I saw someone making and selling converters but they might not work on a laptop.

I have quite often seen 2nd hand joysticks for as little as €5 and not those Atari ones but proper flight sticks. I bought one myself for a couple of tenners (€20 or €30, cannot remember).

Cannot say anything about the stick you have been looking at except make very sure it supports all the buttons and things you will need from it. Is the handle twistable, for example?

This one?

https://www.amazon.com/SPEEDLINK-PHANTOM-Flightstick-Right-handed-Black/dp/B00M1R7QGG

Read the reviews on that site, generally they seem favorable, ie. a good flightstick for its cheap price, with possibly some issues.

By "arcade games", what do you mean? Generally action games, or coin op games (e.g. the GOG NeoGeo games)? How new "arcade"/action games?

I personally don't think all that is doable with one flightstick only. As the name suggest, a flightstick like this is mainly meant for flight simulations, space combat simulations (like X-Wing, Wing Commander series, Descent Freespace 1-2...) and generally older racing games (as a substitute to a pedal/wheels system which few people have and which tend to cost a lot).

For action games, especially newer ones, you pretty much need some sort of XInput-compliant analog gamepad, like the XBox360 PC gamepad, or a Logitech F310 gamepad (which I have). Also newer racing games may require this kind of gamepad, or at least the games are optimized for them.

Some people try to use an analog gamepad with old flight combat and space combat simulations. Depending on the game, it may be doable, but I feel with many of them there will be issues as the games are designed with a mindset that you have your right hand all the time on the flightstick, and the left hand on the keyboard selecting actions, messages to wingmen etc. It is quite hard to operate a gamepad with one hand only.

As for older PC action games, they were generally optimized for mouse+keyboard gameplay anyway, so you need neither a flightstick nor a gamepad for them, generally.