No Gravis drivers for OS X: Xterminator Digital not centered either, & other problems
I just tried using the game with my Gravis Xterminator Digital; it’s an awsome gamepad that rocks for flying, space sims, and driving games (in addition to everything else, except for emulation; the D-pad sucks as bad as most other D-pads).
First, the pitch axis on the proportional stick is being read completely wrong. Instead of finding the center of the axis, it mistakes the top or bottom end as the center. You have to go full in the vertical direction in order to fly level, meaning you can’t pitch in the other direction AT ALL.
Second, using the 3 axis + throttle Backwards setting, the throttle was set to roll. I fixed this in the config file, binding roll to the stick (traditional flying style).
After binding the throttle game function to the throttle control, I noticed that the throttle was operating backwards. When I inserted the necessary text to invert the throttle to correct its operation, the roll function was also inverted (kudos for letting me invert the throttle, but the roll inversion shouldn’t have happened). Setting the invert text to true for rolling fixed this. And if you guys could let us bind where the upper end on the throttle is, that’d be great; mine poops out a tad early.
Confident that I could fix all my control issues on my own, I went to work trying to find the axis that corresponds to the proportional triggers on the Xterminator Digital. Yup, before the Dreamcast, the PS2, the Gamecube, and the XBox, Gravis made a pad with proportional triggers. I’m thinking the control pad designers who made this baby rocked too hard to keep working at Gravis (man, I miss Gravis making hardware). This is one of the reasons that this pad is great for flying and driving games; it actually simulates pedals in a more authentic fashion than twisting sticks. In some applications, the two triggers are read as one axis, and in some as two axes. I couldn’t get the game to find either one of the triggers, much less both. I’m still owed an axis, since this is a 3 axis + throttle setup. I know that the system knows that they’re there, because they work in other things. Please help me out here.
Also, I couldn’t manage to get the D-pad and the hat switch (Yup, a gamepad with a hat switch on it, who’d-a-thunk-it?) to be recognized. I tried setting the digital-hatswitch and the regular hatswitch lines to all do the fire command, but nothing happened when I tried them. Please help me out here too.
I’ll be testing out some other sticks, so it’d be helpful if there were a joystick testing thread or something. No gamepad or joystick makers make any software for their HID hardware on the Mac; it’s going to be completely up to you guys to do your best at supporting what OS X itself does, unless you want to make us all buy USB Overdrive.
On an unrelated note, is there some mission limit that I should know about?
