Mad Katz F.L.Y. 5 config? Key?
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Hello,
Anyone have a good suggestion on how to best configure the 11 (12? 13?) buttons/trigger on a Mad Katz F.L.Y. 5 joystick?
I do not have HOTAS, and probably will be months before I can politically afford to get HOTAS (read: spend the money for HOTAS vis-a-vis other spending/savings the wife might have better ideas for).
I’ve wracked my brain on the “best” button mapping for BMS, but there are so many obvious candidates for a button (or THAT particular button) that I always end up in indecision paralysis. (I know, ‘first world problems brah’)
So far I’ve settled on flying the training missions and if a particularly helpful function is critical and at the same time awkward to utilize on the keyboard, I give it a button on my Mad Katz joystick.
An excellent example of this process is that early training mission with the TGP/FCR/FLIR/Rdr Alt. There’s that one spot where the instructions put you into a situation wherein the Rdr Alt wigs out and you go into a climb that you cannot overpower with the stick. I found out later on you have to hold down the “paddle” switch (e.g. picky lever on high-end joysticks) continuously until you disengage Rdr Alt or other corrective action. Imagine my chagrin when I learned that my joystick doesn’t even have a “paddle” and that “paddle” = Alt-A on my keyboard… Then I re-flew the mission and discovered pretty quick that holding Alt-A continuously with one hand is pretty much ludicrous with all the other things you have to do. I thenceforth assigned “paddle” to button #11 on my joystick where I can activate it whilst operating the throttle levers.
A later training mission learned me to make “TMS Down”, “TMS Up”, “Cursor Enable”, and “Cursor Zero” all thumb buttons (3,5,4,2, respectively), as those were things I needed to have at my finger tips during quick-action times of high workload.
And so forth. Fly a training mission, find out where friction points are (times when I have to cheat by hitting “Pause” while I look-up which keystrokes and train my fingers to hit keys), assign that one item to another button (hopefully in a logical place on the joystick, but alas, it never is an intuitive button - except for trigger obviously), then re-fly.
But surely there’s a better way, no? Surely someone else has used this model of stick and already cracked that nut?
Dang it I gotta get a HOTAS. Which leads to another thread, WHICH HOTAS to get???