Posted February 28, 2015
Elmofongo: USBs did not exist in the DOS era So would that make Wing Commander 1 and 2 harder to use
The interface doesn't matter there, your real operating system is going to handle the real hardware. The DOS games are going to run in software emulation inside DOSBox and imagine that they are being controlled by some contemporary joystick. Unfortunately this also means that the games aren't going to see a feature set beyond the limitations of DOS-era joysticks. The common options for joysticktype= in dosbox.conf are: 4axis: 4 axis and 4 buttons
fcs: 3 axis, 4 buttons, 8-way hat
ch: 4 axis, 4 buttons and an 8-way hat, but no more than one button can be pressed at a time.
It depends on the game which kind of joysticks it supports and the way they work is not always highly configurable. For instance, the X-Wing and TIE-fighter only roll with a buttonpress+left/right, not from rudder, and theres not much you can do about it. The DOS versions also don't support throttle without an external program.
fcs is usually better than ch if the game benefits from a hat but doesn't need all 4 axis. This setup may benefit from swap34=true if you have problems with throttle.
Sometimes you can use the internal mapper of DOSBox to assign keyboard events to joystick buttons or hat to expand its functionality beyond what the original game supports. For instance in Descent a hat would be nice but neither fcs nor ch are desirable because one will lose an important axis and the other the important ability to press more than one button at a time. So for that I use 4axis and use DOSBox mapper to map the hat to keypresses that slide the ship, which is pretty perfect.
(I do my own dosbox setups, I don't know if GOG.com has done a good joystick configuration for you already)