I've been in and out of various flight sims since the late 80s, starting with Microprose's "Knights of the Sky." Back then, a joystick was just a joystick, and unless you had two 15-pin gameports, you couldn't plug in more than one at a time.
Fast forward to 2005, and I've got more game controllers plugged in to my PC than I could have ever dreamed of owning back when I was playing Knights on my 25mHz 386. I've had a lot of this stuff for awhile, and last week I got a new X52 to complete the setup for F4AF. So what an idiot I felt like today, when suddenly, out of the blue, I realized that the pedals on my Sidewinder Racing Wheel could be used as rudder pedals... DUH... I've owned that wheel for about 2 years, and all this time I was still using the twisty handle on my joystick for rudders!
But, that brings up another question that makes me feel a bit dumb: Which way do the rudders work in a real plane? To me, it seems that when you push on the right pedal, the plane should turn right. But when I setup the pedals in F4, by default it was the opposite. The thing is, even though that feels backwards to me, it does have a certain logic to it (something like: pushing the right pedal forward pushes the right side of the plane forward). So which way is it in the real Viper?