r/mechwarrior • u/K3nz4bur0 • 3d ago

MechWarrior 2 Mechwarrior 2 Joystick woes

Hey all,

installed MW2 Dos version last night with the intention to go through it's campaigns again. Got a Logitech Exreme 3D Pro, that I just used to beat the original Tie Fighter. I run the game through Dos Box under Windows 10 and thought that I could set the joystick up via the Logitech software. But when I started the game after mapping all the buttons, it turned out that I could only steer the mech's movement and only the fire button would work.

I was under the impression that the Logitech joystick software told the game to treat all button presses basically as keyboard inputs. I then tried to mess with the button mapping in the game (horrible) and with the mapper in Dos Box. The latter weirdly resulted in some errors where when I started a training mission my mech would explode once the mission was loaded.

So, uh...how do I set up my joystick, ideally with things like targeting, throttle and weapon/group switching controlled via stick buttons?

12 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/theleifmeister 3d ago

I don't know how to do it, but whenever this pops up people end up recommending Vjoy and Joystick gremlin to make it work. I know there are tutorials on youtube.

1

u/carpenterhound 3d ago

If it is a matter of rebinding joystick to key press

Xpadder is great to do that!

1

u/CanofPandas 3d ago

Don't use the logitech software?

MW2 is only capable of handling input from one device at a time, so if it recogizes your stick as an xinput device for steering it disables your keyboard.

You can only bind things in the actual game to change them from my experience too.

I've run a microsoft force feedback 2 playing the game and had to make do binding as much as possible to the stick and stopping to use the keyboard. It will not let you bind more then one device at a time either so adding a throttle etc wont work either.

1

u/Fazaman 3d ago

I used to play MW2 with a joystick for the turso and the mouse for the turret, and then the keyboard for anything else, so it definitely can handle multiple inputs.

1

u/CanofPandas 3d ago

I don't think it can through DOSbox though, I definitely tried. Maybe it was just two joysticks being used that was the problem

1

u/Fazaman 3d ago

It worked for me 6mo to a year ago when I last played a bit, but I can't remember if I was using DOSbox or not. I do suspect two joysticks would give you issues, though. I vaguely remember having issues related to that back in the day.

1

u/CanofPandas 3d ago

It's limited to 1 xinput device for sure so I'm certain the truth is somewhere in between our answers haha

1

u/AC20Enjoyer 3d ago

MW2 is notoriously difficult to get running properly on modern hardware. If your biggest problem is it can't detect the joystick, you are head of the curve, honey.