TR Forums

I bit the bullet, and bought a Logitech extreme 3D pro joystick on sale for $30, since the Saitek X55 Rhino and Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS I really wanted are way out of my price range at the moment ($460!?), and no one carries the the Thrustmaster Cougar, except the folks on ebay trying to charge $400 for a used one.

I got it to play DCS Black Shark and DCS A-10C, but I also want to use it to play Tie Fighter, The Wing Commander series, Wings of Glory, Gunship, and Strike Commander in DOSBox. Does anyone know if I need to edit the dosbox.conf file, or set up individual profiles in the logitech tool? I asked on Vogons, but they take forever to respond. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. I've got a damn summer cold, and playing some of my favorite games from my youth seems like a fun pick me up.

Thanks in advance!

Never used it on dosbox myself, but I will follow this thread too see how it goes.

I wish I could be of more help, but I haven't messed with DOSbox in years (I'm going to start soon). Unfortunately DOS games were each basically their own environment, so even with a common emulator, joystick behavior is naturally going to vary wildly. I remember it being very frustrating even on native hardware, so getting an emulator to make a USB joystick to appear as if it's working through quirky old-school gameports could be a nightmare.

The most important thing is to get the movement axes working. For all the different buttons, a joystick-to-keyboard button mapper such as Joy2key could be a savior.

It works just fine here, you just need to the disable timed argument in the dosbox.ini under the joystick section otherwise the sensitivity is set way too high and there's no deadzone (the stick drifts at the slightest touch).

The Egg wrote:

I wish I could be of more help, but I haven't messed with DOSbox in years (I'm going to start soon). Unfortunately DOS games were each basically their own environment, so even with a common emulator, joystick behavior is naturally going to vary wildly. I remember it being very frustrating even on native hardware, so getting an emulator to make a USB joystick to appear as if it's working through quirky old-school gameports could be a nightmare.

The most important thing is to get the movement axes working. For all the different buttons, a joystick-to-keyboard button mapper such as Joy2key could be a savior.

Hey, gameports were one of the things that more or less worked with minimal fiddling in DOS... as long as you had a joystick that had less than four buttons.

I got it sorta working in Tie Fighter in DOSBox. Most of the 12 buttons on it are unrecognized. Just the trigger and the "hat" work. I'll check the timing in dosbox.conf, since it does tend to "wander" around a bit.

No joy getting A-10C to let me map the buttons. I really wish I could afford that Thrustmaster Warthog, but $460 is just too much for something I'd use with 2 games. A-10C *does* recognize it in the mapping screen, but no luck getting it to let me map the buttons to anything.

I changed "timed" to false. anything else I need to change in the dosbox.conf?

[joystick]
# joysticktype: Type of joystick to emulate: auto (default), none,
# 2axis (supports two joysticks),
# 4axis (supports one joystick, first joystick used),
# 4axis_2 (supports one joystick, second joystick used),
# fcs (Thrustmaster), ch (CH Flightstick).
# none disables joystick emulation.
# auto chooses emulation depending on real joystick(s).
# (Remember to reset dosbox's mapperfile if you saved it earlier)
# Possible values: auto, 2axis, 4axis, 4axis_2, fcs, ch, none.
# timed: enable timed intervals for axis. Experiment with this option, if your joystick drifts (away).
# autofire: continuously fires as long as you keep the button pressed.
# swap34: swap the 3rd and the 4th axis. can be useful for certain joysticks.
# buttonwrap: enable button wrapping at the number of emulated buttons.

joysticktype=auto
timed=false
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false



THIS is what I'm using, btw.

TwistedKestrel wrote:

Hey, gameports were one of the things that more or less worked with minimal fiddling in DOS... as long as you had a joystick that had less than four buttons.

Yeah, but god help you if you wanted to play a head-to-head sports game against someone using a couple 4-button Gravis Gamepads, or had a joystick with more than 2 axes plus a hat-switch. I also remember one of my gamecards needing to adjust itself at boot based on the speed of the CPU. Once we upgraded the CPU past 100mhz or so, the gamecard started to get quirky.

Hz so good wrote:

I got it sorta working in Tie Fighter in DOSBox. Most of the 12 buttons on it are unrecognized. Just the trigger and the "hat" work. I'll check the timing in dosbox.conf, since it does tend to "wander" around a bit.

If you get the movement axes working, try Joy2key. Map the joystick buttons to a keyboard key, and then map the game to that keyboard key.

Hz so good wrote:

I changed "timed" to false. anything else I need to change in the dosbox.conf?

[joystick]
# joysticktype: Type of joystick to emulate: auto (default), none,
# 2axis (supports two joysticks),
# 4axis (supports one joystick, first joystick used),
# 4axis_2 (supports one joystick, second joystick used),
# fcs (Thrustmaster), ch (CH Flightstick).
# none disables joystick emulation.
# auto chooses emulation depending on real joystick(s).
# (Remember to reset dosbox's mapperfile if you saved it earlier)
# Possible values: auto, 2axis, 4axis, 4axis_2, fcs, ch, none.
# timed: enable timed intervals for axis. Experiment with this option, if your joystick drifts (away).
# autofire: continuously fires as long as you keep the button pressed.
# swap34: swap the 3rd and the 4th axis. can be useful for certain joysticks.
# buttonwrap: enable button wrapping at the number of emulated buttons.

joysticktype=auto
timed=false
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false



THIS is what I'm using, btw.

Looks good, unless you want "Turbo" buttons in that case you would need to enable auto-firing. The Logitech unit will work fine with Tie Fighter and X-Wing. These games only handle four-button joysticks so anything more is a waste on them. There weren't that many sims in DOS-era that used more than four-buttons on joysticks. That only became commonplace with simulators coded in the 9x-NT era.