Does the game work with an Xbox 360 controller?

I ll give it a try as I have the game and the controller.

I tried the XBOX gamepad and it works fine, actually.
The axis and commands are strangely mapped and seems not all relevant command are mapped.

I didn't spent time in understanding if and how you can remap axis and buttons.
There is a folder with some joystick profiles but not sure how they have been put together as they seems in binary format (non-text).

I have yet to figure out how to rebind controls the normal way. You can use reWASD to do it though. Assuming you have a supported controller. reWASD is not like Xpadder. You can actually rebind buttons and axis controls that are normally hard coded.

To the old thread, but for the future players.

Get the Joystick Gremlin binding software. It requires to install VJoy software as well, that is virtual joystick driver. The Joystick Gremlin needs to be running (can be autostart with Windows) when playing and activate the profile for each game. And for old games the VJoy needs to be set as default gaming device from Windows USB gaming controllers main window.

First install VJoy, that will create a virtual joystick device for Windows. You can have even multiple of those from its configuration. You can decide how many axis, buttons and hats does the virtual joystick have.

Then install Joystick Gremlin, that allows you to map the physical real joystick to that virtual one.
After small learning curve it becomes very easy to make various profiles for all kind devices.

In screenshot you can see a Joystick Gremlin binding screen for Apache Longbow (1995 Digital Interactive).

It can be scary at first, but on top left you have Open and Activate buttons. The activate button turns green when clicking to pass the real joystick output through Joystick Gremlin to VJoy. To make changes in bindings, you need to reactivate profile (clicking that icon Green -> Black -> Green) to refresh Vjoy output.

Then tabs at top are the devices, like my DIY controller "Maximus", keyboard and even Vjoy#1 (the virtual one).

At the left side you have all real physical bindings from that selected device, you can rename them at top on right side, and you can add all kind functions to buttons and axis.

On top right there is a "Mode" drop-list, where you can select what sub-mode you are editing for the profile. As you can add more profiles to be used behind a shift (press or hold a button to switch modes to whole device). And they can be nested one, as each new mode is blank and only added bindings will override the profile above them.

The profiles saved are binded to the hardware ID itself. So you can't easily open profile for another device and get it working. But you need to open the profile XML file with notepad and replace the device ID with another device to get it opened for it.

how do we set up a stick in game, hitting alt-p to pause works but the C key does not do anything to configure it.