Celestia Forums

I just installed the latest celestia, 1.3.2, cant seem to get my joystick working. I have 3 different joysticks, MS sidewinder USB, MS sidewinder precision pro game port, and a saiteck force feedback USB, all of witch used to work on celestia, but now none of them do. they are all calibrated and all show up as connected under game controllers in control panel, and they all work on other games. and I did turn on the joystick in celestia by pressing F8. Can someone help?

"It works fine for me."

Which operating system are you using?
Maybe some other program has allocated the joystick for its own use? For example, might you be running two copies of Celestia and "the other one" is getting the commands? Or maybe your F8 key just isn't working?

I'm using an old MS Sidewinder Precision Pro plugged into USB on a system running MS Windows XP Pro SP2.

Celestia's use of the buttons isn't well organized (it'd be nice to be able to reassign them), but I managed to get it to do all of the documented actions.

Tilting the joystick changes the direction of the viewpoint (pitch and yaw). Buttons C & D rotate the viewpoint around the center of the screen (roll). The large button (button #2) on the top-left of the joystick increases forward motion and the trigger button (button #1) slows forward motion.

System:
256MB 500MHz P3, WinXP SP2
128MB GF4 Ti4200, Forceware 61.76
Celestia v1.3.2 final.
Sidewinder Precision Pro, USB.

My OS is windows XP, but now that you mention it, I did have a second celestia installed at one time. Been busy lately and really cant say if the joystick has worked since then or not. I did uninstall the second version because I couldent get it to work the way I wanted, but is it possible something was left behind somewhere after the uninstall that could cause this? If so, where do I look?

So far as I know, installation and deinstallation should not have any affect on this kind of problem. The program that wants to use the joystick just needs to call the gameport I/O routines while it's running.

I assume you've rebooted your system to see if that helps. That should get rid of any program that might have allocated the joystick.

It's starting to sound to me like your F8 key might not be working. Perhaps some other program is intercepting it. Do you use any keyboard shortcut utilities? Or do you have one of the special "Office" keyboards? If the latter, try pressing F-Lock to turn off the special Office function key mappings.

Restarting is usually the first thing I do when I have a problem. My key board is just a plain old standard keyboard that came with my computer, nothing special. But I have tested the F8 key in another program so I know it works, I even tryed the on screen keyboard that lets you click the keys with the mouse, no luck there either. Its like celestia isnt hearing the F8 key, but it hears all the otther comands. strange! If another program is intercepting the key like you say, how would I go about finding it? I do appriciate your help in trying to solve this.

wasj2004,

Have you verified that the other function keys do work with Celestia?

I can't tell if by "other commands" you mean the function keys like F7 (set speed to 1ly/sec) or F10 (Celestia snapshot) or just the main keyboard commands.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to find what program might be intercepting F8.

Another thing you might try is to remap some other key to generate the "message" that F8 is supposed to generate.

XP keyboard remapping is done by registry modifications. See http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/w2kscan-map.mspx

MS doesn't seem to provide a utility to simplify this for XP, although there is one for Windows Server 2003. There also are 3rd party shareware programs available. Sorry I can't recommend anything from personal experience (sharpkeys looks interesting, though). Maybe someone else can.

I hope this helps a little.

I just loaded celestia up to dobble check, and F1-7 and F10 all work. Ill check the link you gave but I think registry modifications is a little beyond my computer skills, Not something I would wanna try unless someone told me exactly what to do. Well celestia being the problem is ruled out cause no one else has had this problem, My keyboard being faulty dosent seem to be it, joysticks are conected, calibrated, and working with other stuff. Guess ill go back through my steps and maybee find somthing along the way thats not right. Thanks verymuch for your efforts!