hey there,
the joystick works in the reg scenes, but when i try to fly the mission it wont work at all
any ideas?

I can't get the joystick to work in ANY of the WC series. On the ship, the mouse will work... sort of... it drifts south all the time, and I have to fight it to get it where I need it, then click fast before it moves. Mostly I have to move it north of where I need it, then click several times to get it to click on the area I need.

It doesn't work at all in space, and neither does the joystick. I bought all of the Wing Commander games from Privateer, through IV and none of them are what I would call playable by any stretch of the imagination.

At this point, if it can't get it to work, preferably with my joystick, as far as I am concerned, I have wasted my money.

I do have the original WC 1 cd, but it won't play at all on my Windows 7 64 bit machine :(

Too bad, too, because as I recall, it was really a fun game.

Cursior drift is likely because you either have a gamepad or joystick plugged in that isn't calibrated correctly. Make sure you callibrate the stick in windows itself, not just dosbox. To do this in win 7 you need to go to "devices and printers" in the control panel or start menu.

Now within the games, particularly WC3 and 4 you should try opening the inflight option menu when you get to the space combat (alt+o) and choosing joystick as your controller (or mouse if you prefer) since the game is likely defaulting to keyboard controls. Make sure you hit 'save settings" as well.

I went to the CP and found my "Joystick". It thinks it is a Gamepad. I don't see anything in there to calibrate it though. I have tried properties, advanced, and pretty much everything else looking for a way to calibrate it in Windows. No joy :(

I do want to thank you, however, for attempting to help me :)

try doing ctrl + j worked for me:)

To get rid of the drifting joystick problem in Wing Commander and Privateer I changed the joystick configuration within the DOSBox config file like this:

joysticktype=2axis
timed=false
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false

That did the trick for me.

I had exactly the same problem with a Thrustmaster joystick. The solution given earlier in this thread fixed it. The program had defaulted to keyboard controls in flight sequences. Once I pressed <Alt + O> and recalibrated the joystick, it worked perfectly.