Hi. In the 90's I would always play X-wing and Tie fighter with my keyboard arrows as the flight controls. It always worked fine for me and I got pretty far in the game despite being a kid. With the Gog versions (93 and 94). I'm noticing a huge lag between keypress and the ship actually moving. It's as though the key is mapped to a joystick axis with a considerable deadzone, rather than just treated as a button.

Is the game trying to emulate a joystick instead of just treating the keyboard as a keyboard? Is there a way to configure input?

Your right, arrow keys are pretty bad. Possibly something to do with the Dosbox mapper?

I'm pretty sure that you could not use the arrow keys in the original TIE Fighter to turn the ship

In X-Wing, the DOS version, they would indeed work but also behaved badly... you could turn the ship around, but the turn rate was capped fairly low, so you could not pick up the pace of a sharp turning TIE the way you could with the mouse

Your probably right. Even back then I would have used a flightstick for most of my flight simming/gaming. Of course back then a flightstick was pretty much part of every gamers rig, so I guess lucasarts considered it a none issue.

I still remeber being able to walk into any PC/ game shop around and having a whole shelf of flighsticks and joysticks to choose from if the one i was using broke. Not any more.

Yep, now if you don't want to break the bank and want something *decent* it's either Logitech 3D Pro, Thrustmaster HOTAS X or Thrustmaster t-16000m standalone, and the first two are the only ones you may be able to find in a brick and mortar store if you are *very* lucky, it's either Amazon or bust these days if you want to buy one.