A while ago I played a Sony Playstation game called Buzz! The Music Quiz. The game is a four player multiple choice style quiz game. It was fun, even though I was rubbish at it. The thing that I liked best though was the buzzer controls. I had been thinking of writing a multiple player quiz game but had been unable to find cheap controllers; these were perfect. And it got better. I plugged the controllers into my Windows XP machine and they were recognised. Trouble is, I like to write games in Flash and it doesn't support games controllers. So, I started looking into writing some sort of mapping facility in C++. Fortunately I discovered I didn't need to - someone had already written software that would do the trick.

Joy2Key

Here's how to use this great piece of software to add joystick support to Flash:

Adding Joystick Support to Flash 5

Armed with this technique I had hoped to find the time to create a few 2 player joystick enabled games with a sort of educational element. However, that hasn't happened yet, but maybe by publishing this tutorial some of you talented flash enthusiasts and educators can come up with something.

To try out my demo of this technique please download the following zip file:

joy2keydemo.zip

Please report back to me if you have any problems or if you have found this tutorial useful.

Btw, if you are wondering what happened to my Buzz style quiz game I will hopefully be releasing it on my website soon; it will be downloadable and configurable. Thing is, looks like Sony are coming up with their own classroom version (also configurable). I suspect Sony may just have the edge on me when it comes to the graphics.