Alright, the controlls suck. I hate DOS for a living.

So anyway, I don't seem to be able to use my mouse on WC3, it doesn't work on the game, and I have horrible issues controlling everything else. I don't seem to move my ship at all except maybe navigating. After half an hour I finally killed the fucker I hunted the whole time because he avoided me the whole time, I had to land on the ship. BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW! Why can't they bother making a decent tut in a game to explain how to controll this fucking ship?!

Yes, I downloaded the reference guide, and yes, I added a fucking -i in the DOS configs.

But guess what? THEY DON'T HELP ME AT ALL! The rockets lock themself after 5 shots or something, auto-tracking is a joke, half of the buttons don't work and i get the feeling this DOS crap uses an American keyboard system instead of a German one where buttons are on different places (z and y are swapped)

So please, help me out figuring the controlls out before I ragequit. I will no longer buy any EA title here ever again if I am confronted with this bullshit. They already slapped me on the face with Crusader!

Um... Kind of your fault if you don't bother to read the manual eh?
Hit C to comunicate with the Tiger's Claw, request permission to land and approach the ship. That easy.

The controls I have to admit are twitchy for me as well.
I don't remember the game to be this hard...

If you don't mind me asking, what does the -i do?

You know of the -a552 sound fix, right?

If you mean the Playguide since the manual is only trivia crap, then yeah, it helped me out.
Thanks

Just got it a few days ago. I had similar problems with the joystick. Then I realized that using the Windows (mine is Vista) joystick settings are totally useless, even if you calibrate it well, and calibrate it in Wing Commander as well. Fortunately my joystick allows manual calibration (2 levers at the bottom, make: Genius Model:USB F-23). Long time ago I wrote a very simple joystick setter program in Quick Basic. I went into Dosbox, ran my small program, calibrated the joystick so the midpoint was exactly 128, both on the X and Y coordinates. I checked which button corresponds to the DOS Button 0 and 1 and I didn't (have to look back). I didn't even bother with the Windows calibration, went straight to Wing Commander, calibrated there (without touching the any of the joystick hard calibration levers) and from there on the program is working perfectly well.

If you trust me, I placed that little joystick setter program here:

[url=http://www.mounet.com/~gablau/jt.zip]http://www.mounet.com/~gablau/jt.zip[/url]

Donwload it, unzip it to whichever subdirectory you know how to find, go there and type jt (after unzipping, there is only one file in the zip file, jt.exe, no instructions, as it should be self-explanatory).

Now try to tune your joystick to 128,128, or as close to it as you can. After succeeding, I recommend that you tap your joystick hard enough to make it bounce and observe how closely it returns to 128,128. If it stops too far from these numbers, try the hard-setting again. I had to do it four times before achieving a stable setting. There is nothing to save, no file written to the hard disk, but if you handle your joystick gently, it should remain set well for a reasonably length of time.

I have a problem with controls...

Afterburner is TAB, right? And the afterburner is supposed to speed up my ship?
Nothing ever happens when I press TAB. What to do?

Are you holding TAB? Also the ` key right above TAB locks the Afterburner until pressed again. This is very useful since you're usually doing evasive manuevers

Yes, tried to hold it down, still nothing happened. I can do the auto-slide thing pressing caps lock and then TAB... Weird stuff.

Did you try the ~ key? It's actually ` without shift but that looks too much like an apostrophe to type.

I'm playing with mouse control enabled, and it looks like it switched some keyboard controls off, including Tab and ~. To afterburn I must use right mouse button (double click and hold).

Yep, that worked fine, thank you!

How do I configure the controls in wc 1+2 and how do I exit ?

There is no native remapping support. The DOSBox mapper can be accessed with Ctrl+F1 on Windows; Boxer on Mac OS X doesn't support the mapper.

Exit the game with Alt+X. Many other DOS games use Alt+X or Ctrl+X when there is no exit option provided in the menus.

I won't lie, I did not read the manual cover to cover either but I do have all the documents and I search them but I just can't seem to find a list of the controls for WC