I have a Gigabyte GA_81G100 Pro motherboard. It is a well equipped board with room for 8 usb ports, SATA, firewire, AC97 sound etc.etc. It also has a header for a gameport but no inbuilt port. I have connected a 15pin port/ribon cable to the header, checked in bios to make sure it is enabled. I have tried two different port/cables and two different game controllers: A joystick and a gamepad. Windows fails to detect these most of the time. It did detect the gamepad on one occasion but gave errors when trying to calibrate. I could go out and buy either a serial/usb adaptor for the game controllers or simply buy USB joystick/gamepad but I would like to get some more use out of the equipment I already have. Has anyone else had a similar problem with GigaByte board and know a solution? The board manual I have doesn't offer any info other than enable/disable in bios with two different device addresses to choose from. I tried both.

I don't think it is the fault of the MB. WinXP doesn't seem to support the older gaming hardware. Possibly you may get more info over at the gaming forum.

It wasn't an XP problem as I've used both controllers on another system running XP without a problem. The problem turned out to be the gigabyte pinout configuration. It is different from IBM standard. Once I worked that out it was simply a matter of rewiring the riboncable where it connects to the external port. Try soldering 15 wires of a riboncable all crossed over like spaghetti. Took three attempts to get it right but it's now all good. I had to do it this way because it seems nobody (Not even GigaByte) stocks their connector/cable part.

Can you share what you found for the schematic you ended up using (I have reqired my adapter bracket but with no success thus far).