Looking through the reference card for Privateer 1, I see they didn't bother to map roll left/right to any keyboard key. You can ONLY use the joystick for rolling. Thanks, Origin! If this is the case I'll have to do some macro stuff in Pinnacle Game Profiler (or xpadder for you plebs), but I wanted to check if there was an undocumented mapping before I start, so thanks!

Roll isn't really necessary in such an early spacesim, it's not like it has airplane-like yaw like in Elite, X-wing didn't have dedicated roll control either, it was always "hold joystick button 2 to roll" bar a few exceptions like the Wing Commander games which compensated by not having speed presets that can be programmed on a throttle.

You know what else is really strange? As you said, roll is holding down joystick button 2. But button 2 is also missiles/tractor, and as far as I can tell there is no way to completely deselect missiles, unlike guns. So...you have to fire off a missile to roll?

You have to double click to fire a missile instead of holding the button if I remember correctly.
If anything I always found very difficult to fire missiles this way, before getting my first programmable stick I usually fired them using the keyboard.

There are indeed undocumented keys in my copy. Home (roll left) and Page Up (roll right) have worked for me so far.

Of course, those are awkward, so I remapped them externally ;)

Which version?
Because these don't seem to work with the GOG.com version.

I'm playing on the GOG version for Mac right now, and they're working well for me. I wouldn't think the Boxer wrapper would have introduced any additional key mapping, but I can't compare here without a Windows copy.

Note my title of Mac/Linux guy ;)

I'm playing with windows and tried more or less every key on the keyboard, none work as roll.

Privateer just uses straight DOSBox for Windows, right? I think you can you use a custom mapper.txt file to map keyboard keys, but I'm not sure what you would map them to in this case—unless Page Up and Home have been specifically disabled or remapped in your version already?

Unfortunately, holding mouse button 2 (which allows you to roll in mouse mode) does nothing while in keyboard mode.

Perhaps they are disabled while using a joystick?

Indeed, I just re-tested it, and flight keyboard commands only work while keyboard control mode is active. While Spacebar and Enter can be used to fire guns/missiles, arrow keys and pageup/home are disabled while in mouse or joystick mode. Sad panda.

As I usually play a trader, I prefer keyboard mode, so I rarely switch to the others. That default mapping's unfortunate. I don't think there's much you can do in that case other than use something like xpadder (windows) or karabiner-elements (mac).

I wonder if this was one of the Roberts brothers "brilliant" ideas.