Joystick

The classic DOS game port was a 15-pin connector supporting up to 4 analog axes and 4 buttons - just enough for two basic 2-button joysticks. DOSBox Staging automatically detects your modern USB controller and maps it to the emulated analog joystick.

Some flight simulators of the era expected very specific hardware. Wing Commander, X-Wing, and F-15 Strike Eagle III were often played with dedicated flight sticks, and some titles had built-in support for the Thrustmaster FCS or CH Flightstick Pro. The joysticktype setting lets you emulate these specific stick types if a game requires it.

Because the original game port was analog, deadzone and calibration settings actually matter. If your character drifts without input or the axes feel off, adjusting the deadzone or using the joystick calibration hotkeys (see Keyboard shortcuts) can help sort things out.

Joystick calibration

Most DOS games with analog joystick support include built-in calibration. However, some games have poor or limited calibration, resulting in drift or offset despite calibration attempts.

For these cases, enable the use_joy_calibration_hotkeys setting and adjust the joystick position in real time. Each tap of the hotkeys logs the calibration values, which you can then save in a per-game config:

[joystick]
use_joy_calibration_hotkeys = off
joy_x_calibration           = 0.576211,0.02
joy_y_calibration           = 0.5474,-0.005

Advanced joystick settings

The timed setting controls how joystick positions are measured. When enabled (the default), positions are timed using the emulated system clock, which makes calibration independent of the CPU cpu_cycles setting. When disabled, positions are measured by counting port reads - just like real hardware - which means changing CPU cycles will throw off joystick calibration. The timed mode works well for most setups, but if your joystick drifts despite calibration, try disabling it - the simpler untimed mode sometimes works better with certain USB controllers. circularinput compensates for analog sticks that are physically constrained to circular motion; pushing into a corner only reaches about 71% of the maximum range, and enabling this maps the circular input to a square coordinate space so you get full range in all directions.

autofire toggles each button on and off every frame while held, simulating rapid fire for arcade-style and shoot-em-up games. swap34 swaps the X and Y axes of the second joystick (axes 3 and 4 in DOS game port terminology) if they appear reversed. buttonwrap makes extra controller buttons wrap around to the beginning of the emulated button set - for example, if emulation provides 4 buttons and your controller has 8, button 5 acts as button 1, button 6 as button 2, and so on. Without wrapping, excess buttons are simply ignored.

Configuration settings

You can set the joystick parameters in the [joystick] configuration section.

autofire

Fire continuously as long as the button is pressed.

Possible values: on, off (default)

buttonwrap

Enable button wrapping at the number of emulated buttons.

Possible values: on, off (default)

circularinput

Enable translation of circular input to square output. Try enabling this if your left analog stick can only move in a circle.

Possible values: on, off (default)

deadzone

Percentage of motion to ignore (10 by default). Valid range is 0 to 100. 100 turns the stick into a digital one.

joy_x_calibration

Apply X-axis calibration parameters from the hotkeys (auto by default).

joy_y_calibration

Apply Y-axis calibration parameters from the hotkeys (auto by default).

joysticktype

Type of joystick to emulate.

Possible values:

swap34

Swap the 3rd and the 4th axis. Can be useful for certain joysticks.

Possible values: on, off (default)

timed

Enable timed intervals for axis. Experiment with this option if your joystick drifts away.

Possible values: on (default), off

use_joy_calibration_hotkeys

Enable hotkeys to allow real-time calibration of the joystick's X and Y axes. Only consider this as a last resort if in-game calibration doesn't work correctly.

Possible values: on, off (default)

Instructions:

• Press Ctrl/Cmd+Arrow-keys to adjust the axis' scalar value: Left and Right diminish or magnify the x-axis scalar, respectively. Down and Up diminish or magnify the y-axis scalar, respectively.
• Press Alt+Arrow-keys to adjust the axis' offset position: Left and Right shift X-axis offset in the given direction. Down and Up shift the Y-axis offset in the given direction.
• Reset the X and Y calibration using Ctrl+Delete and Ctrl+Home, respectively.

Each tap will report X or Y calibration values you can set in joy_x_calibration and joy_y_calibration. When you find parameters that work, quit the game, switch this setting back to off, and populate the reported calibration parameters.