Red Planet
Handbook

Gamepad

An Xbox-compatible pad drives all five axes and the grip buttons. Hover or tap a control for its RIO address.

Keyboard

Colour is the bank each key drives: green flies the pod, red is an MFD button bank, amber is a column beside the map. Dark keys are unbound and free to take.

Where the keys live on the panel

Each MFD carries eight buttons: a four-wide top row and a four-wide row beneath it. The keyboard rows run left to right across the upper MFDs, then the lower pair — the same order your hand finds them in the pod.

The pod stick

What the gamepad stands in for. This is the cockpit's own TRIGGER STATUS readout — four buttons on the grip, drawn the way the upper-right MFD draws them. Hover one for its address and its stand-ins.

Upper Main Middle Pinky

Grip buttons

Upper	0x47	Y
Main	0x40	A · Space · Num 0
Middle	0x46	B
Pinky	0x45	X
Throttle	0x3F	RB · Alt
Panic	0x3D	LB
Hat	0x41–44	D-pad · arrows
Config 1 · 2	0x37 · 0x36	unbound — yours to map

The throttle button is reverse thrust; the hat looks around. Both live off the grip on the real stick.

Select a button Hover a circle on the grip.

Both plates are the pod's own instruction art, lifted from the shipped gauge assets.

The mouse

The third input. Every button on every display is clickable and lights when the game commands its lamp — and each one reaches in under the glass beside it, so the picture is the press target. The lit strip at the edge is only the lamp.

Arranging the glass

The pod bolted its displays down at one size. On a desktop panel there is room to trade viewscreen for instrument, so all six are yours to size — and the radar to place. Set these in environ.ini beside the exe; they are read once at startup.

Filling the screen

The cockpit fits itself to whatever window it gets and keeps 16:9, so a wide panel letterboxes rather than stretching. Launch with -fit — start-fullscreen.bat — and it goes borderless over the whole monitor and picks the render size to land on the viewscreen 1:1, instead of you guessing at -res.

Bring your own stick

A gamepad speaks XInput, and the game reads it without being asked. Everything else — a flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals, a wheel — speaks DirectInput, which names its axes X Y Z RX RY RZ SL0 SL1 and says nothing about what they are for. Somebody has to decide that your twist grip is the rudder and that pushing it right means right. That is what joyconfig.bat is.

It writes only its own section of bindings.txt, between two marker lines, so anything you have written yourself is kept — including a deadzone you tuned by hand after trying it. Before it starts it prints every axis at rest: a stick whose driver reports an odd range shows up there as X +1.00 on an untouched stick, rather than as a mystery later. Xbox-class pads are excluded from all of this, so nothing ever counts twice.

# what it writes
joydev 0 Logitech Extreme 3D
joyaxis X   axis JoystickX invert deadzone 0.08
joyaxis Y   axis JoystickY deadzone 0.08
joyaxis RZ  axis Pedals deadzone 0.08
joyaxis SL0 axis Throttle invert deadzone 0
joybutton 0 button 0x40
joyhat 0 up button 0x42

# grammar
joydev <slot>    [product-name substring]
joyaxis <src>   axis <axis> [invert]
                    [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>]
joybutton <n>   button <addr> [toggle]
joyhat <n> <up|down|left|right>
                    button <addr>

# a named slot binds that product; a bare
# one binds the Nth stick Windows lists

A twist grip is usually RZ; a HOTAS throttle is usually Z or SL0. Set RP412JOYLOG=1 to log devices as they attach and drop away.

Rebinding

bindings.txt sits beside the exe, written with the full default layout on first run. Change a line, restart. Delete the file to restore these defaults — worth doing after an update, since an existing file is never overwritten.

# grammar
key <name>      button <addr> [toggle]
key <name>      axis <axis> deflect <n>
key <name>      axis <axis> rate <n>
pad <button>    button <addr> [toggle]
padaxis <src>   axis <axis> [invert]
                    [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>]
joydev joyaxis joybutton joyhat
                    see above

# deflect springs back, rate sticks where
# you leave it (that is the throttle)

# examples
key J        button 0x40      # trigger on J too
pad X        button 0x40      # trigger on X

key NumPadAdd      axis Throttle rate 0.75
key NumPadSubtract axis Throttle rate -0.75

# drop 'invert' to flip the stick
padaxis LeftStickX axis JoystickX deadzone 0.2

Why the sound changed

Red Planet's sound effects were never files. They lived as samples inside two Creative AWE32 cards, uploaded from a pair of soundbanks and played back like an instrument — each sound a chord of up to four layers, every layer with its own pitch, its own level and its own filter. The port that brought the game to the desktop had those banks but not the cards, so the layers were flattened into plain wav files, and a good deal was lost in the flattening.

The original banks have been read again, and the sounds rebuilt from them.

Files beside the exe

Six files in the game folder are yours. None of them ship. The game writes each one the first time it needs it and then never touches it again, so a new build dropped over this folder keeps everything you have set — and deleting any of them simply starts that part over with the current defaults.

The rest of the folder

Shipped data the engine reads. Nothing here is meant to be edited, but it is worth knowing what is what.