X-Wing Alliance is a very advanced Star Wars-themed flight simulator first published in 1999. It was a huge success, due to its immersive storyline, amazing graphics(for its time, lol) and multiplayer fun. The game lasted well beyond its lifespan, but the X-Wing series of games just…stopped coming out, meaning space flight sims faded away.
However, like every other awesome game, loyal fans worked on a project to upgrade the game to 2017-ish standards. The upgrade is called XWA Upgrade and the add-on pack with even more ships is called “Darksaber’s Ultimate Craft Pack,” or DSCUP for short. The game looks amazing with these upgrades, and is just as fun (probably more).
credit to http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3810445/all/X-Wing,_Tie_Fighter_and_X-Wing
However, before you begin playing, you might notice the game apparently “requires” a joystick to play. Naturally, I don’t have one since I’m too lazy to get it. That’s why this tutorial will be on how to use a mouse as a joystick for X-Wing Alliance (this should work for most other games too).
The first step is to download vJoy. vJoy is what makes the mouse-to-joystick program work. (so it’s required.)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vjoystick/files/latest/download
After downloading vJoy, run the installer from your downloads folder. The installer is pretty straightforward.
credit to https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/16/xwing-alliance-upgrade/
Next, download the actual mouse-to-joystick program.
https://github.com/raptorswing/MouseToJoystick/releases
Download either the 32-bit or the 64-bit version for your computer, but if you don’t know if your computer is 32-bit or 64-bit, just download the 32-bit version.
Now, extract the zip file you downloaded, by finding it in your downloads folder, right-clicking it, and pressing “extract all.” Look for the new folder in your downloads called “Mouse-to-Joystick.XX-bit” and move it to somewhere you will remember (putting it or a shortcut to it next to your game shortcut on the desktop is a good idea.
Now, every time you want to use the mouse-to-joystick program with a game, open the folder and run the MouseToJoystick.exe program inside. Double-right click to enable and disable the joystick mode. This allows you to continue to use your mouse as well as the joystick.
The program should look something like this.