JoystickMouseTool Manual

Introduction

JoystickMouseTool allowing the mouse cursor to be controlled by a joystick. It emulates the three standard mouse buttons, extra mouse buttons, a mouse wheel and supports both relative and absolute positioning modes.

Requirements

1. Windows95/NT/2000 or higher
2. A joystick supported by Windows

The tool supports all programs using the standard windows functions for mouse input. It does not work with programs retrieving mouse data at a lower level.

Usage

After starting the program a small icon shows up in the task bar:

Either the normal joystick mouse icon indicating the tool beeing active
or a crossed joystick mouse icon indicating the tool beein in idle state

The tool switches to idle state automatically if the joystick is not connected or switched off. A left click on the icon will open the setup dialog, a double click will close it.

Configuration

After a right click on the tray icon the following options are available:

• Relative movement mode like a mouse:
  • Moving speed can be adjusted via trackbar.
  • Deadzone setting allows adjusting the range of the center position according to the joystick precision.
• Absolute mode like a graphic tablet
• Mouse wheel emulation
  • The mouse wheel can be mapped to one of the joystick axes available
  • Mouse wheel speed can be adjusted independently
• Extra mouse button emulation (if the joystick has more than 3 buttons)
• A drop-down box where one can select the joystick to use
• A drop-down box where one can select the joystick to use
• By assigning any joystick button as unlock button mouse movements and button presses will only be simulated when the unlock button is pressed
• Any of the simulated mouse buttons can be assigned to a certain joystick button using the drop-down fields at the bottom
• The remaining buttons should be pretty self-explaining

Tips and tricks

• The displayed configuration takes effect immediately. So there is no need to close the configuration dialog for testing it.
• Relative mode can be combined with other pointing devices like the mouse itself, absolute mode cannot.
• A well-calibrated joystick using the control panel is heavily recommended, especially if a simple analogue gameport joystick is used.
• If you cannot reach all corners in absolute mode recalibrate the joystick using the control panel while always keeping some distance from maximum elongation during calibration.
• The configuration dialog also supports the Tab, cursor- and enter on the keyboard.
• Mouse wheel emulation might not always work with older, unupdated versions of Windows. This also applies to the extra mouse buttons. Starting with Windows 2000/XP, two of them are defined.
• Mouse, Mouse wheel and extra button emulation can be used independently. Thus, its also possible to use the tool just for emulating a mouse wheel without emulating the rest of the mouse.
• The current version of the tool is available at deinmeister digital delusions