I have an old Genius 2000 f-16 game port joystick. The instruction manual says it doesn't need any drivers (under win95/98).

So I've added it as a 4 button joystick with throttle.

However, it looks like joystick's pots have very small range. Before I calibrate it I can see all movements basically move up to 3% of the entire range of motion. After calibration it works, but due to the fact this small range gets amplified it seems the pointer during joystick test trembles a lot on its own. I found some software to set dead zones etc for a directX input device so it is kind of usable when I set 10% dead ones, but I would like to improve it if possible.

So my question is, is such behavior normal? Specifically before you calibrate a joystick in win98 are you supposed to see a large range of motion?

Second, perhaps someone has seen a fault that results in such symptoms? Movement remains smooth, there are no sudden jerks on it etc. It seems to work fine, just with tiny range of motion until it is calibrated resulting in it "dancing around" the center position on its own once it is calibrated (I suspect the input gets amplified a lot, that's why).

Edit: the joystick uses 100k pots internally and it does use only a small part of their range which suggests this behavior is normal. Can someone confirm? (as I never had a pc joystick before)

In DOS joy testing tools posted some time ago. In joycheck the axes behave a bit like I'm windows. They are on left top of the box and tremble on their own a lot. However in joy test, x axis is solidly on 10(moves 3-15) y a is is solid on 8 (moves 3-14). Throttle moves 3-16 too.