In case anyone has stumbled across this page in Google, I’m writing this in hopes of sparing you from some of the fustration I felt when I learned that my brand new Logitech G5 laser mouse’s extra buttons weren’t natively supported in Battlefield 2. As an avid computer gamer, I frequently bind my wheel mouse button to “zoom” or “alternate fire” as games sometimes call it. I also bind my thumb button to something handy. I do this because usually I use the right mouse button as “jump”. I’ve never been a big spacebar fan for jumping.

Regardless of my personal preferences, the point here is that those two buttons on the G5 are considered “buttons 4 and 5” to a game. BF2 isn’t known for supporting many mice buttons beyond the standard 3. After some digging and a little coaxing, I figured out a work around to get those buttons to work until such time as EA includes updated mouse support in one of their patches.

What we’re going to do is configure the mouse buttons to be something else, keyboard keys to be exact.

Here’s how. Oh, and click the thumbnails for a larger view.

1. Get the latest SetPoint drivers from Logitech. As of Jan 1, 2006, this should be current: Setpoint 2.47 (English)

2. After installing SetPoint, open the settings dialog. (Mine was: Start -> Logitech -> Mouse and Keyboard – >Settings)

3. On the very first screen (top tab if you’re looking at the tabs on the left), towards the bottom, select “Manage Programs”. We’re doing this so that your normal day-to-day desktop settings won’t get messed up and our changes will apply only to BF2 (or any other game that has this problem, I hear CS:S has the same issue).

4. Select “Add” and browse to your BF2 game folder. Select BF2.exe. Click “Open”, then “Ok” on the list screen.

5. Select the newly added “BF2.exe” from the dropdown box.

Now it’s time to change some button behavior. Keep in mind that you can do this for any of the mouse buttons (though it’s probably wise to leave “left click” and “right click” alone), even the tilt wheel. In this example, I’ve chosen to only modify the thumb button and the wheel button since thats all I’ll be using.

6. Select the button you want to change. In my case, this is button 3 (the wheel). Next, check “Keystroke Assignment” from the options. Next, pick a key that you know you DON’T USE IN GAME. This is important. I chose the “right bracket”.

7. Repeat step 6 with any addition buttons you want to change. This time I selected the thumb button and changed it to “apostrophe”.

8. Click “Apply” and “Ok”

9. Next, fire up BF2, or whatever game you’re trying to get these to work in. Find the appropriate options menu. I’m changing my Alt-Fire button, so that’s what I have highlighted in the example.

10. Rebind the action to the KEYBOARD KEY (not mouse button) you just used in the mouse config. In my case, ” ‘ ” and ” ] “. Notice in the screenshot I’ve bound them both to the same action. This is not nessisary, it was only for illustration purposes. (I later rebound apostrophe to “parachute” in case you’re wondering).

11. Click “apply” and you’re ready to play.

What you’re just done is made BF2 THINK you’re using ” ‘ ” and ” ] ” to do those actions, when infact, with the mouse software, you’ve set up your mouse to emulate those keys. You press your wheel button and the game thinks you’re hitting ” ] ” , which you’ve just bound to the game action.

Easy huh?

I hope this prevents people from throwing your mice against the wall like I almost did. Happy gaming. 🙂