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I bought some retro C64 joysticks for which I doubt that all buttons work correctly, e.g. acceleration in a car racing game does not work as expected. I assume it interprets one of the digital buttons as an analog value so the game accelerates with a certain percentage only.

Therefore, I'm looking for a software that

  • can check all buttons (digital values)
  • can check all axes (analog values)
  • on Windows (7 SP1 x64)
  • is gratis

Some years back I recall that such a thing was included in DirectX, but I could not find it. I have already tried dxdiag.

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  • Off-topic, how did you manage to make the C64 joysticks work on a modern PC? – Alejandro Dec 31 '15 at 17:16
  • @Alejandro: it's not the original C64 joystick, it's a clone which looks exactly the same but has a USB interface – Thomas Weller Jan 1 '16 at 8:52
  • FYI: it turned out that the acceleration button was set to auto-fire and was therefore toggled repeatedly, giving only 50% of the maximum acceleration. An undocumented and unlabelled switch turned that into "normal" behavior, thus giving me the full 100%. – Thomas Weller Jan 1 '16 at 11:24
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In any recent edition of Windows, try searching for 

Set up USB game controllers

(For example in Windows 8, try searching in settings – start search by pressing (Windows logo)+W, then type game or controller.)

This displays Game Controllers window where you can see your joystick/gamepad/steering wheel/whatever... and by pressing the button below the list, you can view current input on all device axes and buttons.

If you prefer keeping your system clean from additional software which adds no extra value, just go with the above built-in thing.

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I was able to solve my C64 joystick problem with the approach described by miroxlav.

If you have problems with that approach, the Joystick Test Application also worked for me and it was designed to bypass limitations of the Windows built-in feature:

For some reason the ‘Game Controller Settings->Properties’ panel doesn’t always work, especially for joysticks with lots of axes and buttons.

There is no explicit license given, but from the description it seems the author provides it for free for testing purposes.

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