Joystick palette VI questions

[tcjinaz]

I have been exploring the joystick VI's and I am a bit confused.

Hardware setup:
MacBook Pro OS X 10.9.5
Parallels 10.1.2
Windows 8.1<something> (not easy to find)
LabView 2014
FRC 2015

ThrustMaster joystick plugged in and recognized as USB0. Can drive the simulator with an arcade drive robot.

Two observations:

1) WPI_JoystickGetInfo never returns anything useful, either from the joystick recognized as USB0, or from the nothing attached to USB1

2) The "error out" output of both WPI_JoystickGetInfo and WPI_JoystickGetValues don't seem to care if anything is attached as USB1. Shouldn't there be a 'False' on the Status element of the error cluster if there's nothing out there?

I was really hoping that if there was only one USB device attached, the system could tell me that there are no more. Maybe this is the price we paid for such easy connectivity?

Bigger picture: I'm trying to figure out on the fly if three joysticks, or a gamepad and a joystick, or two gamepads are attached. We're having some debates in the drive team...

TIA,
Tim