It may not be so with other flight sims, but with the DCS titles, assigning double functionality to your joystick buttons via a shift button is really simple. However, it may not be obvious how to do so. After coming across several rather lengthy guides on how to provide a shift button with the appropriate joystick programming utility, I believe it is time for a short howto:
First of all, this guide assumes you are using your joystick in DirectX mode. In order to define the shift button, open up the control settings page.
Ever wondered what the Modifiers button on the bottom left is for? We are going to find out--by clicking on it. Up comes the modifiers panel.
On the left side, you can see a list of the Modifiers--among them, LAlt, LCtrl, etc, the usual keyboard modifiers. These work all as you think they do--they change the meaning of other, ordinary keys as long as they are held down.
On the right side, there is an empty list of so called Switches. According to my experiments, these work in the following way: Pressing the Switch switches it on or off, depending on the current state--just like a switch ;-). If the Switch is on, and you press an ordinary key, it is modified by the Switch, like the usual modifiers do. But additionally, the Switch is switched off again. So basically, a Switch is modifier you do not have to hold down, and it affects only the next ordinary buttonpress.
Now let's add a new modifier--you can see I already defined a modifier JPinky:
You can select any connected input device, and any button on it, and name the modifier as you like.
Using your fancy new shift button is straightforward. Just press the modifier button together with the "ordinary" button. In A-10C and Black Shark 2, this works for assigning it too, in Black Shark 1, you have to select the modifier from a dropdown menu.
The modifier will be a specific button on a specific device, but it can "modify" any button on any device. You can probably combine several of them, but I haven't tried that out yet.
So, no need for the Control Manager or TARGET, unless you want to do something a little more fancy.
