Hey there guys and girls,
I've been thoroughly enjoying the trilogy since purchasing it and have has few issues with the games and were mostly all fixed by the recently released patches.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy with using the keyboard setup to play the games, however after using my joypad on 2 & 3 on those lazy days when I just want to recline in my chair and use a controller I tried with TR1. When the game booted up to the main menu the icons started cycling around on their own accord with the controller plugged in and would not let me select anything, so I was curious if this was merely a bug or whether it is possible to successfully use a joypad for this game. Thanks in advance. :D

Okay, after a little searching I discovered how to fix the rotating bug and get it to partially work on my controller by editing dosboxTR.conf in notepad, however I have now encountered another issue. It does not allow me to map keys to every button. start and select do not register on the game, nor to the two top shoulder buttons. The game registers the two bottom shoulder buttons as the same key and it will also not register pressing in the thumbsticks. Kind of at a loss here because I need those buttons to function for the game to actually be playable on a joypad, otherwise I'd have to fiddle around with both the pad and the keyboard and that's far too messy.

Already done so, it's not made much of a difference.

Just use a mapper program like Joy2key or as I use Xpadder, map what keys you want to use to what buttons and there you go. If that still not quite working try going into the control options in the game's menu and switch to custom controls and then reset the keys in that with your mapped controller. You may get a weird glitch where if you load a game the game will use your right step button as a draw weapon and step right button if that happens just go to the in game control menu while playing and quickly close it out.

Tomb Raider 1's controller setup doesn't seem to like to play well with newer controllers by themselves.

yeah as much as it blows paying ten bucks for xpadder i bit the bullet and paid it, it works perfectly for tomb raider.