I'm trying to make my beloved old Tie Fighter game work. It launches fine, but five minutes into the mission the joystick stops working. I'm using an old Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. It works fine, then in the middle of the mission pulling up causes the ship to spin on the z axis, and no other controls work.

Is this a mapping issue? The stick has a ton of buttons, am I hitting something I don't intend to? Any help welcome, thanks.

My guess it's the additional axes (throttle and twist) that mess with the game.
Are you using the windows version or the dos version?

If you've got the same issue I have, then let me save you my fourteen hours of frustration. The Collector's CD version of TIE Fighter (by far the superior one) had a glitch in the joystick controls 'when using the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro, the Suncom Raptor, or other joysticks which may incorporate controls using axes from joystick 2.' There was a patch published in 1996, that thankfully you can still get at archive.org here. Download that, copy the 'Z_TIE__.EXE' file to the install folder, overwriting the version that's there. Voila! Working joystick controls!

If you're using one of the other two versions of TIE Fighter, then I can't help you, sorry. I'm just SO glad someone on a Discord I'm part of remembered this patch from TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO and it solved all my problems. Hope it helps you, too!

After my experience with this old and good games:

-Only one play device must be connected to the PC. If you have a Joystick, pedals, game pads, etc , thats is a open door for problems with the joystick.
-More simple is Joystick or more basic, better is and free of problems.