Hi All!
Its been a very busy couple of weeks, as tax season both personal and corporate is upon me at the moment in Canada, as well as transferring my websites to a new service provider. But I can say that I have been doing a lot of testing of Wim's drivers for game controllers in between. I can report some success in the process, and would like to share what I have found so far.
Bottom line if you need a summary at the start: Wim Brul has made a significant contribution to moving game controller use forward under ArcaOS and other legacy OS's before it, with USB, however I suspect there is still things to do. Here's what I found so far, using a legacy Joystick (Thrustmaster Mk. II).
My testing focused on three areas at the moment:
1) Seeing if the current drivers could be used in a virtual DOS session, natively under ArcaOS (all my main systems are currently using v5.0.7)
2) Seeing if the drivers could be used with my joystick under the most current version of DOSBOX ported by Jochen for ArcaOS / eCS / OS/2 (an SDL based emulation).
3) Seeing if the drivers would allow me to use the joystick with a native OS/2 game (to my knowledge very few and far between, especially games that had game controller support)
For 1) above, using the joystick under a Virtual DOS Session
I will not go into all the testing details provided by Wim as this post is long enough already - if you would like to see his very detailed instructions, please download GAMEPAD-2022-03-17.zip, which Wim attached to one of his previous posts in this thread. I am currently putting together a testing guide based on what Wim has produced in the past, and additional items I've discovered during my current testing, which I hope to have available in the next few days.
After confirming that things worked properly with first Wim's usbecd.sys and then the drivers which Wim kindly produced for us, for my Thrustmaster Joystick, I got two programs working in a virtual DOS session as follows:
Comanche 2 by Novalogic (1995) - an attack helicopter flight simulator of the never produced US AH-66 Comanche helicopter. Novalogic produced four separate versions of this software program, but I chose this one, as I have worked with it in the past, and also have had a copy of this running perfectly on DOSBOX. It also specifically supports the Thrustmaster Flight Control system as one of the built-in options.
Castle Wolfenstein 3D - One of the first of ID's many successful "shoot'em up" games, same era as Comanche 2. I chose getting this game running for testing as:
1) I understand Wim had tested his drivers on it with game pad controller(s) provided by Martin Iturbide, and was able to use them successfully
2) The program actually provides visual indications as to whether the program is detecting certain equipment, including joysticks and sound cards.
My original testing was not producing any results (controls not recognized), until I realized one thing, and then correctly set the second thing (ie. DOS session settings):
FIRST - assuming the device drivers are installed properly, it is VERY important to have xevents.cmd running in the background, while playing the game (can be enabled through a windowed ArcaOS command prompt) - otherwise the game will not recognize the joystick is there at all
SECOND - at least for my Joystick the DOS Session Settings GAME_DIGITAL_RESPONSE and GAME_DIRECT_ACCESS must both be set to OFF.
With the settings identified above, for COMANCHE 2 first, I was able to calibrate the joystick (a necessary step in COMANCHE 2, each time I played), and got the joystick to be recognized during flight tests.
If GAME_DIGITAL_RESPONSE was enabled, I could calibrate, but no buttons were recognized in flight and the stick would only work if I pulled back on the joystick, essentially backing up the helicopter in flight. With GAME_DIRECT_ACCESS enabled, I could not even calibrate the joystick, as no control functions were recognized at all.
With the correct settings I was able to both fly and complete a simple mission. However:
1) No buttons on the joystick were recognized other than the trigger button (there are four buttons in all - don't know if they define the first button as 0 or 1). The trigger could lose focus and suddenly not fire the weapon selected, and would require the key with the same function on the keyboard to be used, to reengage the joystick.
2) The hat (viewfinder) could not be used at the top of the joystick (in one case which I could not reproduce, the hat did give directional view control, but then locked the game, and I could not reproduce this again).
2Wim - if you recall we reversed the lines governing axis control in xevents.cmd to see if that was the problem related to the program not seeing the joystick - I went back to the original xevents.cmd, as I found with the modified version, the hat in COMANCHE was actually sending the directional control signals, normally generated by moving the joystick. OOOPS
3) While the joystick could be moved and used successfully, directionally, to guide the aircraft, it would often lose focus (ie. the joystick would suddenly not turn or move the aircraft, or would continue to turn or move the aircraft endlessly, based on the last stick position). Using the same control function on the keyboard for a second or two would reengage the joystick but it could lose focus again at any time.
As to Castle Wolfenstein I was able, first, to get it loaded but in a rather ugly fashion - it does run well, with the DOS session settings I'm using, but you seem to have to push a random number of buttons during loading to get the starting screens to display on screen - if someone has a sure fire set of DOS session settings to get it loading nicely, please let me know!
As to sound for both COMANCHE and WOLF3D in a viretual DOS session I'm still puzzling over what SET BLASTER settings to use successfully in AUTOEXEC.BAT for both, if such can be done. Any suggestions welcome.
When Wolfenstein loads the first screen it indicates, with the settings described previously, that a joystick is present. Calibrating the joystick was a bit difficult, as the program didn't seem to recognize some button presses, but I eventually was able to calibrate the joystick and got both the trigger button (identified as button 0 in the program) and button 1 (which I mapped to open doors) to work. Wolfenstein did not identify either of buttons 2 or 3 although it indicates that buttons 0-3 can be used).
Running the program with those settings I was able to play the game, but found very similar to COMANCHE 2 that the joystick could lose focus, directionally and required the key strokes on the keyboard to occur, to get the joystick to function correctly again.
Buttons 0 and 1 (based on WOLF3D's definitions) remained the same, and did not lose focus.
Once the joystick calibration occurred in Wolfenstein, I have not needed to calibrate again thankfully.
All for now in this post - tests for the other items in another post and Best!
M
