I'm in the rare minority that hates the way these games control with an actual flight stick, and am much more comfortable using a combination of mouse and keyboard for pointing & shooting and movement. I played through all of X-Wing (which has native keyboard movement controls) using mouse movement for precision shooting, supplemented with the arrow keys for continuous movement (especially nosing up and down during dog-fights.) The combination of keyboard and mouse minimizes the need to constantly pick up and re-swipe the mouse when trying to do a continuous turn or dive. It worked great for me and is my preferred way to play.

However, Tie Fighter is a different beast entirely because of the lack of native keyboard movement controls.

I've read online that there is a way to configure Dosbox to "trick" the game into recognizing the keyboard arrow keys as joystick movements (along the x and y axes.) I'm aware that you can change key bindings in Dosbox using Ctrl-F1, including setting joystick movements to specific keyboard keys. In theory, rebinding the keys in the Dosbox key-mapper and then forcing the game to recognize a 2axis joystick by editing the config file SHOULD allow this to work, but once I launch Tie Fighter, the joystick calibration never works properly and the cursor goes haywire.

Has anyone managed to successfully do this? Any help would be most appreciated. I just want to play Tie Fighter without headaches. ;-)

Not necessarily the answer you are looking for, but I played these games with the mouse by modifying the sensitivity in the Dosbox configuration file (default is 100 and I think I used 800). This way you don't need to pick-up and re-swipe.
Alternatively, if you want to try the 1998 version, check Eleriel's post.
The XWA_DDRAW_d3d11 not only enables 3D acceleration, but also offers to possibility of emulating the joystick, which works both with keyboard and mouse.

Here's one possible solution: https://github.com/raptorswing/MouseToJoystick

Hi guys :) I am looking for a way to reverse x axis. Is it possible in dosbox controls ? Only thing I see about mouse is Cap Mouse. When I click it it says mod1, mod2, mod3 and hold.