Been playing the game for a while now and I was extremely surprised to discover that it actually supports analog sticks and buttons, like the ones in 360 controllers. Sadly, my third-party 360 controller doesn't work quite perfectly with it - no matter what I do, the car always steers slightly to the right, even when I'm not touching the analog stick. And there doesn't seem to be an option to enlarge the dead zone anywhere in the game or the setup.

So, to those who are playing the game with an analog controller: What controller are you using and are you having any issues with it? Maybe a first-party 360 controller would work fine here, but I'd like to get some feedback first.

When I started I played by mapping the keyboard buttons to the joypad via XPadder, but after racing a few laps with the analog controls it's just impossible to go back.

I'll just answer myself so it may benefit somebody else later on:

I managed to fix my controller's issue by editing the dosboxScreamer.conf file in the game's installation directory and changing the value "timed=true" to "timed=false". After that I had to calibrate the controller again (in the same file, set "cycles=max" to "cycles=20000" and replace "starth.exe" with "setup.exe", this'll make the game start icon run the setup instead. Return the original values afterwards) and it worked great in the game.

Thanks for the tip Ghegs. Haven't I seen you somewhere before? ;)

Whatever might you be talking about, mysterious stranger?

One more controlled-related issue I had and fixed: Every now and then when taking a corner the shift down button would just stop working, usually resulting in the car hitting the wall. Turns out the game takes the L3 button (when you press the left analog stick down) to be the same as the controller's button 0, which is what I had mapped shift up button into. So when taking a tight corner by pushing hard on the analog stick I would accidentally hold down L3 as well, which then blocked the shift down button from registering. Remapping the shift up to a different button fixed it.

Bumping this to let people know that setting "timed=false" in dosbox_screamer2.conf made Screamer 2 control a lot more smoothly for me, like it did for the first game. So if you're feeling the car controls just a bit weird, try that.

Also worth noting that the game seems to get confused if you have more that one controller plugged in at a time, so unplug everything else and re-configure the controller in the Settings program. You can also have only the one controller plugged in while playing or weird things happen. Kind of a bummer, but not a huge deal.

I'm playing on an official Microsoft 360 Pad. Analog triggers work nicely and everything.

Thank you, thank you! I finally was able to run setup and setup my controller!