Erratic Joystick Behavior using OS/2 Warp 3.0

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by Tal Barenboim

Last update: 10th February, 1996

Symptoms
Joystick support in DOS based game is erratic. The Stick jumps, flickers and moves unintentionally.

Hardware
I have a CH Products Flight Stick Pro, hooked to my PAS/16 Sound card. This baby works fine in DOS with no problems. I have also enabled the joystick support in the MVPRODD.SYS line in the OS2 CONFIG.SYS.

Problem
I have tried to play Tie Fighter thru OS/2 Warp in a FULL SCREEN DOS box. The settings of Tie Fighter were created by OS/2 Install after it found it on my disk.

Im able to calibrate my joystick in tie fighter and game works very well, The problem is that when you are in flight you joystick contorl is very bad.

The Joystick appears to be pulling to the left, EVEN after it was calibrated correctly.

I have made a test - i do not touch to the stick after calibration, and then i can see that the stick is like been pushed to the left every couple of secconds, like someone slaps the stick and it returns to the middle.

Procedure
Oscar M. Fowler (oscar@cs.arizona.edu) writes: (2nd March, 1995)

Many people have this problem with many games. It comes down to a problem with reading the joystick port accurately when OS/2 is doing its pre-emptive multitasking thing. At any rate, Robert Manley has created and I'm helping distribute a driver which does its best to fix this problem. Many games run perfectly after installing the driver, others are being worked on. If you'd like to take a look, you can ftp the driver: ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/incoming/game02a.zip .../32bit/driver/game02a.zip