After years of surviving with a crappy $10 joystick, I went out and picked
up the Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital. While I am generally very pleased
with its performance, I've noted an anomaly that affects my performance in
games such as N2.
When I enter the game, I calibrate the joystick. While in the calibration
screen, I seem to get a lot more random play in the stick than I did with
my old one. (i.e. random movement in the scale without my hand on the
stick.) Also, occasionally the calibrated values seem really skewed.
Typically my X-coordinate limits are around 90 and 250, centering around
170. Y-coordinate values are similar. However, sometimes one of the
limits will be really different (like 40 or 50 instead of 90, or around 280
or 290 instead of 250). This has the effect of throwing off the center
position, forcing me to recalibrate. Also, the self-centering mechanism of
the joystick seem rather "loose", as I will allow the stick to center and
it stops at a certain value, but after pushing the stick in another
direction, it will re-center at another value that isn't particularly close
to the first.
I've got one shareware game (can't remember what it's called, it came on a
CD of game demos with my machine) that calibrates the joystick every time
you start the game, and this game typically doesn't work at all. When I
try to accelerate (pushing the stick forward), my car will accelerate very
slowly, and only reach a top speed of around 40-50 mph. (It uses an
automatic ***, and won't even shift up at that low speed.)
While playing, particularly in N2, I have also noticed that the car will
occasionally jerk to the side (usually to the right). Also, under hard
acceleration, esp. out of the pits, it seems to fluctuate back and forth
across the "squeal" threshold, without any change in joystick position.
The joystick includes a Win95 control panel, and it seems to exhibit some
of the same symptoms. (poor centering, in particular)
Because the joystick is digital, there are no available manual adjustments
to any of these features.
System configuration:
Pentium 120
32 MB RAM
Windows 95 OSR2
Nascar2 ver. 1.03 - latest patch
Logitech Wingman Digital Extreme drivers ver. 2.01 - latest update from
their web site
Has anyone else had similar problems, or know of a solution?
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Kurtis Miller
