2020 is almost over and I'd like to wish everyone a happy new year 2021. A new release of CPCEC is in development: writeable Dandanator cartridges will be its main novelty, together with several fixes and tweaks as usual.

By the way, I released a fourth public version of "Fire Tyre" back in Xmas, but I forgot to mention it here: mobile camera by default instead of static, four rival cars instead of three, maximum speed is now 225 mph instead of 180 ("Continental Circus" was a big inspiration), practice mode where you can play each track separately, etc.
Carnivius, CPCEC and ZXSEC do nothing special with the joystick, they simply request the first available joystick to Win32 or SDL2 (depending on the compiled version); the joystick configuration is up to the operating system.
tjohnson, I don't know, I'd have to know more about your system. Did CPCEC run faster in past versions? Is the "Video: software render" option on or off? Did you try different scanline and interlace modes? (some consume less CPU and video power than others)