About Joysticks

The joystick is an ancillary input device for applications that provide alternatives to using the keyboard and mouse. The joystick provides positional information within a coordinate system that has absolute maximum and minimum values in each axis of movement.

Joystick services are loaded when the operating system is started. The joystick services can simultaneously monitor two joysticks, each with two- or three-axis movement. Each joystick can have up to four buttons. You can use the joystick functions to determine the capabilities of the joysticks and joystick driver. Also, you can process a joystick s positional and button information by querying the joystick directly or by capturing the joystick and processing messages from it. The latter method is simpler because your application does not have to manually query the joystick or track the time to generate queries at regular intervals.