Still a bug-fixing machine here. The joystick support is in all of the games, and it seems to be working quite well. I'm probably going to dump the joystick support in ZapPod! because using the joystick removes your ability to fire in two directions at once. Trust me, it's important to be able to fire in several directions at once.

For joysticks, I got a good suggestion that I first get the joystick properties to get the max X and Y values for the stick. Turns out that 0-65535 is not a fixed value. Of course, I should've figured. Nothing's fixed in Windows :)

In the aim of sharing, I'm gonna give out one of those stupid little utilities that I use all of the time. This little one's called OptBmp, and it's really nice if you use tons of 256-color bitmaps in your games. I realized quite a while back that most paint programs save out a large color table even if your picture doesn't use too many colors. OptBmp analyzes the bits in your bitmap, removing unused color-table entries. It's not a big savings in bitmap size, but the savings can add up if you use tons of bitmaps in your apps. In theory, this utility could break programs that have brain-dead bitmap loaders, but I haven't found one yet.