So... got today a brand new, shiny Thrustmaster 16000M. Great piece, but can't configure it for Descent 1 properly.

What works: primary fire, secondary fire, flare and drop bomb as well as basic X and Y axes.

What does not work: pretty much everything else. Slider - is detectable and can be set for throttle, but does nothing in the game. The same for axis in twisting the handle - it is detected and can be set for bank or slide, but does nothing in game itself. If I choose Thrustmaster FCS as control option in the menu, twist works only one way and allow to slide up, slider is still not working and hat does nothing, despite it being configured for sliding in control menu.

I saw people here using this stick for the game, so any ideas what to do?

Also: I am asking for classic Descent 1, Descent Rebirth does not have any of these issues, I can configure whatever I want and it works. Just want to know if there is any hope for classic game other than joystick + keyboard or "forget and just play rebirth".

Hey buddy, I honestly can't answer this specific case, but I know that it's pretty decent stick for it's price hardware-wise. Having contactless magnetic sensors instead of traditional (cheap) potentionmeters present in most sticks and pads. I still fly a lot of flight sims (DCS, some Rise of Flight, a bit of IL2 and some civil flight sims once in a while) and I know a lot of people use T16000m that I know and I also recommend that stick as mid tier hardware. I personally have VKB Cobra that is similar in build, has magnetic sensors too, but better gymball and electronics. Haven't really tried to play many dos games with it over the years though, except Tie Fighter and it supported only 2 or 3 axis at most I think and required quite a lot of tweaking.

About whether T16KM should work with the old dos/win games, I think it should, but it might need more configuration (or plugins to recognise more axis e.g. in dosbox), because the old sticks back in the day connected via gameport had some limits on number of axis (it's not like today where your hid controller board can easily have 32 analogue axis and then some, all in high resolution). At least that would by what I would try to get it work, if the old Descent even supports more simultaneous axis natively by single device (I honestly don't remember). Otherwise as you said...Rebirth, etc.

Try posting on the DBB www.descentbb.net

There is a ton of resources there for tech support and I know one person who has a HOTA setup.

You can use the thrustmaster software TARGET to map the remaining buttons, at the time joystick were either gameport-only with 4 buttons max or were hybrid devices with keyboard passthroughs that were bundled with a software to allow to map all the buttons to keyboard functions save for some very specific models that sometimes were supported out of the box by some games (the old Thrustmaster FCS springs to mind).

Ah, true, could try that. Just need to learn how to do it from manual :D

Yup, using TARGET software allowed me to make things work.