I have a CH Flightstick Pro that I want to use on MS Flight Simulator 5.0 for DOS. Computer is a 486. I get an error message in FS and can't get it to work. Does it need its own driver? Since it has a hat and several buttons, it might not work without further ado - but I don't know? Surely someone here knows.
It's been a very long time since I ran that game, and I didn't have the "Pro" version of that joystick back then.
But I'm pretty sure 2 of the buttons and the joystick work like a standard joystick and should just work without any extra fiddling.
The "throttle" slider signals an axis from the 2nd joystick, at least that's how it is on the regular "Flightstick".
I don't know what's involved to get the additional buttons and hat to work though.
These joysticks won't work properly with a joystick splitter, because they act like 2 joysticks.
I've got a CH F-16 Combat Stick which looks similar but has more buttons. The way that one works is: the PC game port supports 4 buttons, so whenever you press a physical button on the joystick, it is encoded as a combination of those 4 game port button inputs. Here are my notes from reverse-engineering what those combinations are:
Button combinations (button 1 = LSB)
Button numbers are based on the numbers given by Linux 3.10.0 and 'jstest' with the analog joystick driver in "fullchf" mode.
0000 no button pressed
0001 button 1: trigger
0010 button 2: red button half-way down left side of stick (countermeasures)
0011 top-right hat left
0100 button 3: bottom right grey button (display management)
0101 button 5: lone red button above trigger (missile step/nose wheel steering/aerial refueling disconnect/A-G toggle)
0110 bottom-left hat down
0111 top-right hat down
1000 button 4: pinky switch
1001 button 6: top left red button (weapon release)
1010 bottom-left hat right
1011 top-right hat right
1100 bottom-left hat left
1101 UNDEFINED
1110 bottom-left hat up
1111 top-right hat up
(I think my notes about what the buttons actually do might pertain to Falcon 4.0, I'm not sure)
I'm pretty sure some games would let you select the joystick type and it would natively understand this "protocol" without a driver.
I'll see if I can find whether I have a driver disk for it. I think I might have both a driver disk and a sheet of paper that came with it, even though I got it second hand!
I found a floppy disk for my F-16 Combatstick. It suggests that it has a Windows 95 driver (which makes sense, Windows 95 does have a game controller API) but for DOS it says:
No setup is required for DOS games. All you have to do is let the
game know that you want to use the Joystick (i.e., F-16 CombatStick,
or CH FlightStick Pro) instead of the Keyboard. Instructions on how
to do this should be outlined in the game's manual.
Apparently it does have a JCENTER.EXE which can be used to test it though.
Perhaps check https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fil … 462&menustate=0 to see if it has the equivalent for your device.
