TUTORIAL : How to turn Virpil's mini-stick into a 4-way hat

Hi guys,

INTRODUCTION
When I received my (super) Virpil Alpha Constellation joystick last week, after more than a month of waiting, I was very disappointed to see that the mini-joystick could not be used as a 4-way hat for panning views.
Then I said to myself, it is not possible that a thing of this price (shh, don't tell my wife) cannot do exactly what we want it to do.
Virpil is known for the excellent quality of their products but also for the extreme complexity of their software. In fact, it would take a year of lessons to get to the bottom of it...
I searched on their forum, then on YouTube and I only found imperfect solutions.
But since I am very stubborn by nature, I finally got there.
I struggled so much that I thought I would write this little tutorial to avoid the same hassle for those who are lucky enough to have this great joystick and who would like to bind the mini stick for panning.

CONVERTING AN ANALOGUE DEVICE INTO BUTTONS
Open VPC software.
On the AXIS tab, you'll find the Pitch and Yaw axes for the mini stick called rY and rX on lines P3 and P4.

Double-click on the rY line. It will open a second window where you'll find the "Axis to Button" settings.
There you'll want to check both the 0-20% and 81-100% check boxes.

Click on SAVE AND NEXT, then do the same for the rX line and click SAVE.

LOGICAL AND PHYSICAL BUTTONS
Click on the BUTTON tab now.
On the bottom right, you'll find the physical buttons mapping with your new entries 33, 34, 35 and 36

Now, in the upper box you have the 32 default buttons (for the Constellation Alpha Prime joystick) or less, if your mini-stick is on your Virpil throttle. So in our case, the first empty line is Button 33. Click on it.
Type 33 in place of zero on the Physical box, 33 being our first "Axis to button" entry for the Pitch rY.

As I said already, if your device has less buttons, the first empty logical button will be 30 or some other number.
Here physical and logical are the same but they could be different.
Now, click on SAVE AND NEXT and enter your second Pitch value (34 in our case).
Do the same for the two rX Yaw values, buttons 35 and 36 in our case.
WHEN DONE, CLICK ON THE GREEN SAVE VPC DEVICE BUTTON  or you'll lose all the hard job done! 😊
We have finished converting the analog mini-stick into a 4 buttons device, now we want to bind this guy into a 4-way hat, so let's close VPC software and launch MSFS (or whatever sim).

WITHIN MSFS CONTROL SETTINGS
We now have our 4 new buttons in the Control settings.

You will easily bind your 4 view axes to these new buttons.

DONE!!
The result is smooth and perfect.
Hope it will help you to enjoy this beautiful piece of hardware.  🙂

Edited December 23, 20241 yr by David Roch