Currently i’ve messing around with a few Joystick to Midi packages the past few days…
There is various stuff around, while i have a Logitech Wingman Force (some dawn aged thing that eats up a lot of desktop space), i plugged in the USB connector it has next to the serial connector and start playing around with three different software packages…
The first one i tried was called MJoy
http://www.otk.it/mjoy/
Mjoy found my Joystick controller quite well, but was not able to support all buttons available on it.
Though it does support 2 joysticks each may have 6 buttons and 6 axis. Why did it failed to find most on mine?
The second one i tried is a rather old package from around '97 MidiJoys by Soundtower:
http://www.soundtower.com/synth/midijoys.htm
In spite of the nice feature that MidiJoys supports two devices simultaneous, it does not seem to support USB joysticks so for my joystick, it is of no use unless i probably plug in my serial connector into the computer and fire it up. Unfortunately, i only have one serial 9-pin port and it is being used by one of my office tools that i frequently need.
Then i stumbled upon vMidiJoy from Vellocet, their latest version only supports USB joystick models, which seems on target with my device…:
http://vellocet.com/software.html
But will it support all my buttons as well?
Almost! The range only goes up to 8 toggle controllers and 8 feeder controllers. I have 9 buttons so it lacks an additional toggle channel for that 9th button, but it is somewhere at the end anyway. Also it does not supports my POV-hat rudder on the top of the stick. Yet so far, this piece of software allows me to program most of my joysticks options.
Together with MidiYoke i was able to fire up a configuration and the simply attempt controlling two Hydra devices, one with the X-axis and the other one with the Y-axis…
When you fire up Renoise, the first thing that you consider will probably trying to map it to the X/Y device… But frankly, why would one need an X/Y device if you have a joystick?
If you have a joystick with 8 buttons and 2 wheels, you have enough to control a lot of stuff within your two hands grasps and that goes beyond the possibilities that the X/Y device itself can offer you…
The only problem for me is though… i have no idea why i should control stuff with my joystick as i’m no live artist 
These kind of controllers do 5 to 20 bucks on ebay if you can still find them…
However, you will probably be a lot better of if you get one of those fine console usb controllers that have rudders and buttons within the grasp of your fingers…
Need a simple midi adaptable controller for a few bucks? those are the possibilities…
The above controller does 5 euro’s (6 or 7 bucks?)
