That's his debut novel and I think it shows. Experimental, and has some puzzling sections. Having read that, Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, I think the latter is his strongest writing but the plot isn't as grand and dramatic.
We're going to see a lot of changes like this as the legacy media structure continues to lose its hold on the global attention budget. There will be multiple layers of major consolidation, and dramatically reduced budgets.
Fortunately, the variety of content will increase, and some of it will be higher quality than the average big media piece, as smaller teams create passion projects. Overall budgets will shrink, but advances in technology will (hopefully) allow the production quality to stay relatively high.
The description of the Japanese woodblock printing process in https://education.asianart.org/resources/the-ukiyo-e-woodblo... says that the artist's initial drawing is pasted face down on the woodblock, which is then carved to match it. So (unless I've got myself confused) the final print will be the same way round as the artist's drawing. This also means that text in the image (like the title and the artist's signature) come out the right way round.
A mouse for Descent? We used to play with both hands on the keyboard- look, slide, and spin on the number pad, move, fire, etc. on the far left side. We're we alone?
I would sometimes play “co-op“ with my little brother, navigating with a flight stick and the number pad while he managed weapons and firing. It’s fun to see decades later that we weren’t the only ones to play Descent this way!
That’s the way I started but eventually used two FlightSticks. Banking movement with one hand (forward, backward, sideways), rotating around two axis with the other (barrel roll, pitch), and the thumb sticks I used for up/down and left/right. Although I might misremember some details. There was a time when I really wanted to add a pair of pedals, too. Ah, to have that much time to spare again.
The Macintosh version of the FlightStick had an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) plug that had a port on the other end so you could plug in another device. It’s been 30 years. Do you think I might misremember? Maybe it was a FlightStick and a Saitek joystick? If you are running the original game on period hardware and tell me that the software wouldn’t know how to tell two different joysticks apart regardless of which type, then I guess I’d have to admit that there’s something fishy with my memory.
look into "period hardware" which is itself a "dual joystick" (typically literally sold for use in descent). it's a gimmick that sold i.e. why have one joystick when you can have two. Then you should just have a single i/o interface to your MIDI game port.
I dug around in my archives and found this post, someone is running Descent in DOSBox on an XP machine and using two USB joysticks and xpadder to set it up.
THE way to play Descent was with a Spaceball Avenger. I was a beta tester for one, holding it in your hand was like your brain interfacing directly with the ship. Sadly the sensors broke over the years and I'm settling for joysticks.
The wingman was amazing. Lot's of leeway and light and smooth. It seemed to have been built for environments like descent, where your fighter swooshed gracefully through space under any 3d angle.
