Fix: Unreal Tournament 2004 and Sidewinder Dual Strike Controller

I’m a big fan of Unreal Tournament 2004 (2k4), and before that, the original Unreal Tournament.  Back in my day, we had LAN parties and my favorite controller was the Microsoft Sidewinder Dual Strike.

Fast forward to 2017 and Windows 10.  Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 3369 patch) will install to Windows 10, and the Dual Strike controller is natively supported but the X and Y axis are screwy, in my fresh install of UT2004, the crosshairs wanted to move all around the screen in a repeat circle, that is assume of course that you ticked the Enable Joystick in the Input section of Settings. 🙂   No where in the GUI does it allow you to determine the actions of the X and Y axis.

I prefer the X axis to turn left and right (instead of strafe) and the Y axis to look up and down (instead of move forward and backward)

If you’re the same way, you’ll want to edit the user.ini file located in your game install system directory.

For this example I’m going to use the default and assume you installed to C:\UT2004.  Proceed at your own risk.

Go to C:\UT2004\System

Scroll down to User.ini, select it with your mouse and press CTRL-C and CTRL-V, this will make a Copy of User.ini in the same directory (for backup purposes in case you screw it up)

Now you can open the User.ini file with Notepad.

Press CTRL-F and type JoyX= and press Enter

Remove the JoyX, JoyY, JoyU, JoyZ, JoyR, etc lines and replace with the following:

JoyX=Axis aBaseX SpeedBase=100.0 DeadZone=0.1
JoyY=Axis aLookUp SpeedBase=100.0 DeadZone=0.1
JoyV=Axis aBaseX SpeedBase=2.0 DeadZone=0.4

Start up UT2004 and take it for a test spin.

If you need to make changes, close UT2004 completely, make your changes and open the program again.  The values from user.ini only seem to be read at game launch.

You may have to play with the DeadZone and SpeedBase settings to get them to your liking.
DeadZone is how much of center you want to consider dead space and not count towards moving your character on-screen.

If none of this worked, made things worse, or you just want to make it go back to the way it was, delete the User.ini file and then rename Copy of User.ini to just User.ini

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