AC and RR?
I know of a few games with those "initials"... you'll have to expand a bit on that so I know exactly which you are talking about.
I did some digging for joysticks that are supported, and I came across several that are having trouble.
However there was one bright spot.
It seems Kernels newer than 4.10 have better joystick support. I'm not sure which kernel you are running, but you might check it out.
I know that Ubuntu LTS was running 4.4, and that the Ubuntu team was simply "back-porting" security fixes rather than updating the LTS to a newer kernel...
As far as my Fedora install is concerned...
Since I currently have a 4GB boot partition (which is beyond "overkill") I set "dnf" (the update program) to keep ~20 (I think) kernels at a time. Instead of the standard 3.
I've got kernels all the way back to the default 4.8.6, so If at any point something goes wrong, I can always go back to a previous kernel.
I used this when SH4 started flickering a few months ago. I was able to confirm that it wasn't exclusively WINE that was causing the issue.
So here I sit with a boot screen full of kernels... and no pop-corn.
If you have time one of these days, you should try one of the Live-DVDs for Fedora, and see if it recognizes your Joysticks, etc.
It might surprise you.
And yes, you can get Cinnamon Desktop on Fedora too.
Barracuda