Hi ILP,

Yeah joystick and mouse input are really nice to use in some kinds of games. And in a few others completely essential to the genre.

Though you could try to access these devices by raw code, I'd recommend instead trying an already established library that handles most of the tricky stuff for you. Even with the 'hard stuff' done for you, there is much that you may need to code around it to make a nice control interface for your games.

I personally use JEDI-SDL which has a whole ton of game related functionality (graphics, sound, networking, etc) including keyboard, mouse and joystick input handling. But you can of course look for others.

Asphyre, Omega, UnDelphiX and DirectX headers would give you solutions aswell, but they are not cross-platform compatible (DirectInput only) if that is what you're looking for.

Hope this helps.