http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18424
--- Comment #11 from Nathan Gray n8gray@n8gray.org 2010-12-29 13:24:13 CST --- As I said in the initial bug report, the descent freespace demo also doesn't work.
There are a few things to understand when considering this problem:
* The joystick support in Wine only works when built for Leopard and above.
* Last I checked, the popular build of Wine by Mike Kronenberg was built for Tiger and thus didn't include the joystick code. This could have changed by now -- it's been quite a while since I looked into this.
* When I poked through the Wine joystick code it looked like it might only support somewhat newer versions of directx (v5 and up maybe?). IL-2 for one example uses an older version of directx. Not being an expert on this codebase, I could be mistaken.
I wouldn't disqualify IL-2 as a test case. It works fine with USB sticks in Windows and thus it should be supported in Wine. It might not be the best case to *start* with, but it's an extremely popular flight sim and worthy of support.