i own swos and its so difficult to play with keyboard, please GOG make this have controller support its a great game it jsut needs this fix added thanks

I haven't tried this but I own an XBOX-360 for Windows controller and will download the game and try this out but first wanted to post it in case you're in a hurry to try something.

See this post.

Okay, very disappointing. I downloaded and tried to play "vanilla" (meaning before making the changes in the post I linked to above. Completely unable to play. It didn't recognize the keyboard at all... and moving the controller resulted in wild, erratic and uncontrollable movement on the menus. In fact I couldn't even quit the game (ESC along with everything else I guess on the keyboard was ignored). I had to go to task manager and end the task.

So then I went into settings and make the suggested changes and followed the instructions (you have to basically calibrate your "joystick" in settings by following some directions). I then restarted the game with NO APPARENT CHANGES whatsoever. I couldn't start a game, couldn't play a game, and couldn't quit out of the game. Had to go to task manager again.

I hadn't played this in years and I too played with a gamepad (back in the day) but IIRC have played since using a controller... I don't know if I'm misremembering that though. Possibly I'm misremembering or possible it used to work on like Windows XP or 7 but not on 10 maybe. I dunno.

Sorry I was no help.

i just hope GOG recognises this issue

What's SWOS?

Edit: Ah, sensible soccer. No access to the DOSbox keymapper, I take it?

not sure but it needs to be sorted out

Not GOG's problem. Use a 3rd party tool if controller support is important to you... they (GOG) can't reverse engineer the code of the bloody game!

Ironically enough I bought a Steam controller specifically to use for old GoG games.

they seem to be able to change features in other games and SWOS was never played with a keyboard cos it was on consoles

Gog may be able to do something... but they aren't based on a post in the forums. Someone will need to start a support ticket for there to be any hope of any fix.

Without your message, I would have thought this was about SWOTL, ie. "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe", a flight combat simulator.

First I was like "Waiddaminute, did GOG really have that game...???".

And yeah I guess you need a flightstick or something to play SWOTL good.

SWOS was originally released only for Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS, so no, it was not "on consoles". It may have been re-re-re-released much much later on XBOX360 (according to mobygames.com), but that is irrelevant.

Back when this game was released on PC, and in MS-DOS in general, PC didn't really have "gamepads". Gravis tried to release some kind of Super Nintendo kind of digital gamepad but it didn't really become that widespread, only mildly successful.

So yes, the PC version was meant to be played with a keyboard, and possibly an analog joystick. And yes it was quite normal for MS-DOS games that you had to manually calibrate your analog joystick, if you wanted to use it with a game.

There is not much GOG could do to change that. Since it is apparently a DOSBox game, one option might be that in the DOSBox settings, you tell it to reroute the keyboard mappings to your gamepad pad and buttons (not the analog thumbstick). I recall doing that with e.g. the GOG version of Tomb Raider, in order to play it with my Logitech gamepad.

I think I did it through the DOSBox keymapper. Read this, especially the part "Examples about remapping the joystick":

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Mapper

I assume by "successful" you must be talking about how it sold as opposed to it worked. I played with gamepads since the 1980's on consoles and since the EARLY 1990's on PC's. (Joysticks on PC's since the 80's too, but my first gamepad... a la the NES type... was about 1992 or 3. And it worked perfectly fine and in fact had built in support in many games (the first Redneck Rampage comes to mind).

So yes... gamepads for DOS games were a thing well before SWOS.

Yes, they did exist, but you had to install drivers for them and they were often naff at best, tripe at worst.

I didn't install drivers for them. In games like DOOM and Wolfenstein the gamepad worked flawlessly even though there wasn't "built in" support for it. There was built in support for joysticks and I used to just go in and calibrate the gamepad as though it were a joystick (using the 4 direction button thing as the stick) and played those games for hours and hours using a gamepad in the early 1990's. I preferred the gamepad feel to the joystick feel probably because I gamed a lot on the NES and SNES and have been using gamepads on PC since the early 1990s. At least 1993 but I think even before that. And I still don't recall ever installing any sort of driver... unless maybe when I first bought it???? Maybe that was it??? I know I don't recall doing it for individual games.