Plug in your hardware. Then boot up the game. The game should detect the hardware joystick in addition to your keyboard and mouse.

Note that if the game crashes because you have a modern computer, then look up the dinput.dll fix on one of the other guides.

this game will run on windows at a lower driver level than steam, therefore any "community layout" is a lie. The original devs assumed that all computers would have an escape key, so there is no way to map it to a controller.

I chose "gamepad template" as the default steam layout for my xbox controller.

Certain controllers that are old may require some playing with device drivers. Another user posted this on the discussion and I added it here for completeness. I didn't vet this listed info though:

• UPDATE: If your OS is Windows 11 you need to DISABLE "CORE ISOLATION" IN SETTINGS > DEVICE SECURITY , otherwise it will never detect older joysticks like my Logitech Force 3D Pro. If necessary, disable any other controllers and uninstall the joystick drivers from "Device Management" and only after disabling "core isolation" reconnect your joystick to the USB port, from that moment it will also be seen internally by the Steam platform.
  
• Some versions of windows have a "preferred joystick device" setting somewhere that can be checked and potentially is found by this game's device scanner/detector..

From the main menu, navigate with your keyboard to "settings" and choose joystick. You can then play around with mapping the controller.




Items to note while mapping in these menus:
1) Triggers are detected, but when trying to remap, triggers are often never "fully pulled", so the game will never recognize a soft pull and will almost never recognize a hard pull while you are mapping, so your best bet is to keep the triggers as they were and map the other buttons. As a last resort: In the game's "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Star Wars Episode I Racer\data\config\current" folder, the "control.map" files can be found. You should be able to open/edit these files with a standard text file editor, as a last resort to remap the triggers.
2) There is no way to remap the "start" and "select" keys, so if you are in the middle of a race, you will need a keyboard to get to the menus via the escape key.
3) There is a fairly large default "dead zone" possibly because N64 controllers were notorious for having floppy joysticks. You may want to decrease that to make your steering more snappy.

Contrary information: while playing with a device with no "keyboard" or "mouse" aka the steamdeck, the start and select keys seemed to work as the "escape" key. This could be due to:

• steamdeck is a different operating system, so steam could edit the "detected inputs", or
  
• steamdeck had no keyboard, so the game mapped start and select to the avaialble "controller"
  [**] This second possibility could be tested. I think that if you started "big picture mode" and disconnected the keyboard, then you might have the game map to the start and select on any controller. Please comment if you verified this on a different device or operating system, but I don't think ill do this any time soon personally.