Just purchased this game. Never played it before, I play a lot of mondern games but am a huge star wars fan. Sorry for noob question, but is it possible to use my usb joystick's throttle to control the throttle in this game?

Yes...sort of. There's a mapper function in DOSBox you can use to assign the increase throttle and decrease throttle commands to your throttle control on the joystick. While you can fiddle about and figure it out, there's a better option. Phil, another user here, has a pretty good tutorial on that (and other things) specific to this game.

Have a look at this post: http://www.gog.com/forum/star_warsr_xwing_and_tie_fighter_series/xwing_1994_tweak_guide_video_graphics_sound_music_speed_and_controls. It also serves as a decent primer for DOSBox in general.

Thanks a bunch that tutorial helped a lot. One more question, is it possible to do a barrel roll without having to hold down a button, or at least change the button you need to hold down while doing one?

You're welcome. =) Phil has some other good stuff, too, but he did a great job at getting to the nuts and bolts of the 'Box. I'm glad it helped.

No, unfortunately. Or not that I've found. The problem is that three-axis controllers didn't exist when X-Wing was made originally. The dev team compensated for that by incorporating a roll as the function call on one of the buttons for the flight stick. What that means is that you can always pitch (up-and-down) and then either yaw (side-to-side) OR roll (rotation along the center axis) but not all three at once. So the second button on a two-button stick controls targeting (a click will select the target currently in the crosshairs as the "active" target) and toggles yaw and roll (off means yaw, and held toggles roll).

I tried to use the DOSBox mapper to mimic the toggle function, using the MOD 3 function. As the DB wiki seems to indicate, it is for two-button combinations where you hold one button and then press the second one to actually activate the command -- think like ALT-C to bring up X-Wing's in-game flight stick calibration, as an example. No matter how I set it up it just didn't work correctly.

It's possible I was doing something wrong, but it seems that there are only two ways to set that command up within the DB mapper. I use the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro stick, and also attempted to use the Logitech mapper to set that sort of thing up...but DB appears to not see external mappers, which does make sense. I eventually gave up as I'm used to not using roll in X-Wing since it's the one truly clunky part of the simulation. Not that I don't miss it, just that I recall a time where I couldn't miss what I didn't have. ;-)

Azrapse is working on a fan-made update, which I believe would have to incorporate native support for z-axis (twist) movement for capable flight sticks. Don't quote me on that, the form post is now eleven pages long and I admit to doing some skimming at times. You can have a look at it here.

We are nowhere near there yet, but it will definitely support all modern input axes that you could expect from a game written today.