Hello, I've recently purchased Rebel Assault 1 & 2 as well as the early Wing Commander games but I can't get any USB joysticks to be recognized in the game and am forced to use a mouse and keyboard. I'm running 10.8 but wondering what joysticks might work?

Any help would be appreciated.

Are they running in DOSBox? I don't know much about DOSBox on a Mac, but if that's what they're running in it might give you an idea for the direction to google in.

I think you'd need to set up DOSBox to take your USB joystick's input and use it to emulate an old 'joystick-port' joystick in the DOS environment.

Not really. Any decent new-ish USB stick should be recognized just fine, whether DOSBox or older Windows game from a time when there was no such thing as a USB stick yet. Sure, DOSBox or GOG's use of Boxer may need a little bit of config tweaking, depending on the stick, but on a whole it's fairly competent in recognizing sticks.

So I actually tried out RA 1&2 on my Mac mini. Seem to be working okay with my stick although the calibration is off. Even without that problem, I think RA 2 plays a hell of a lot better with mouse controls, although some of those vehicle maneuver missions can be a bit challenging. RA 1 would work great with stick if it calibrated correctly. The mouse controls for that one are quite horrendous in comparison.

By the way, did you actually set the controls to 'joystick' on the setup screen before launching the game? It doesn't work automatically with sticks unless you do that, since both games are initially set up for mouse-only controls.

Those are the only two games with which I have had actual calibration issues. I've played Wing Commander, Privateer, TIE Fighter, and Descent without any problems before. *shrug* Just tested Descent again, and no problems there, although I actually enjoy it more playing that one with mouse+keyboard controls.

I'm not talking about DOSBox/Boxer recognising the stick, I'm talking about whether or not it's passing it to the game in a way the game recognises.

I think I found out the issue. I was using USB Overdrive and somehow it was not passing out signals to the game. I uninstalled it and now the joystick came up in Rebel Assault.

Wonder if there's a way to install Overdrive back and not have it affect the game?

According to the step by step (ooh,baby!) page you should be able to make exceptions for specific devices.