Wow, seriously?
Better add some joystick emulators then if someone wants to try driving with mouse... these things are freeware and the companies seem extinct, cause I got them from some forums myself... I doubt there will be any legal problems with that.
First one, jmouse, is pretty straightforward, you install it, approve the drivers that windows rejects, and go to control panel, there click "game controllers", click "add" and find mouse joystick in the list.
Then you can configure it from start menu, mouse joystick properties. Most important is x scale/y scale in mouse tab, that is the axis sensitivity. As you can see, its extremely huge, default is 1024x768. I usially set it to 400x300. I prefer to set brake/trottle axis lover than steering axis, but you can set it as you prefer. Restart the pc, the open gpl.
Calibration will pop up and if everything went fine you will see the calibration lines moving when you move your mouse. Move the mouse to both ends and center both bars, then press enter. After that you can assign trottle to mouse forward, brake to mouse back and steering to mouse left/right. I put shift up/down on the left and right mouse buttons.
Btw, joy emulators wont interfere to your normal windows work, they wont capture the mouse and you can navigate game menus with no trouble at all. Seems it activates only in games that support joystick, and yes, it works in all games.
Now, problem is, that jmouse sometimes interferes with some motherboard resources and the driver wont activate at all (gives you error when you try to select it from game controller list). You can try to make it use other resources. Go to control panel/system/hardware/device manager, there you will see the standart game port marked with exclamination mark if you have problems, right click properties/resources/set configuration manually and try to switch between the basic configurations - but it wont allways work. Thats why now i use the other one, PPjoymouse.
Install PPjoymouse and approve all drivers. After that go to start menu, parallel port joystick, configure joysticks. Press "Add", then just expand the drop down menu on joystick ports and select "virtual port". Add it and close.
Then go to control panel/game controllers and activate the driver "PPjoy virtual joystick 1" in the game controller list (this one never had problems at my computers.) Go back to start menu/parallel port joystick, and send a shortcut of PPjoymouse to your desktop. Open it. You will need to open it every time before running gpl, to use the virtual joystick. There are sensitivity settings here, I set them usially to 75 xgain, 140 ygain. Save your settings to .ini to load them easely when you open ppjoymose (you'll need to do that every time you want to use the emuator).
Then, (this is important) press ctrl/alt/del, press tab processes, locate PPjoymose and set its priority to high or wery high. This is important only for gpl, because it takes too much priority over the joystick otherwise. Then open gpl and calibrate the controller the same way as jmouse.
The unconvinient thing about ppjoymouse is that every time you'll need to open it, load ini settings and set priority before running gpl, but its not as hard as it sounds.
Umm...that sounds extremely complicated and dangerous, but I doubt you'll manage to ruin your pc that way... If you understand what I'm blabbering about at all...
Edited by s2173, Jul 02 2011 - 08:31 AM.