Zadok_Allen: Dear Wing Commanders,
please enlighten me as to whether or not there is a way to use a JoyPAD for Wing Commander!
So far I tried Privateer and it "half-worked"... I reckon it mistook the pad for a stick, leading to limited & faulty functionality(?).
Is there a patch / mod / update to fix that?
Perhaps later titles of the series allow the use of a joypad? Thank you for your answer!
There is the DOSbox keymapper function (which is a bit of a pain to use and cannot override the two buttons already mapped by the game IIRC) or external programs like joy2key (more intuitive but still has the same problem of not being able to override the two buttons supported by the game) or Joystick Gremlin (which seems to be a more complete option but I never used it).
Keep in mind that at the time 90% of the PC gaming crowd had a two button gameport joystick/flightstick, anything more complex had its own software libraries to map additional buttons and axes because there was no directinput or xinput API (even today Thrustmaster, Logitech, VKB, Virpil and CH Products still have those to allow the use of macros and iron out compatibility issues).
Of course some gamepads have similar proprietary softwares nowadays (like the ones from Logitech) that should also allow to override any weirdness in the default mapping of the game but it's not very common.
A video about the DOSbox keymapper:
https://youtu.be/0nVjB9hSoJI Even later titles are a bit limited in that regard, IIRC the only one that allows in-game mapping is Wing Commander V because it was made primarily for Windows and even then you may have issues because it expects a 4 axis joystick (so three centerd axles and a slider for the throttle which gamepads don't have).
