Lucasarts' X-Wing and TIE Fighter (floppy versions) have undocumented support for joystick hat switches and four button joysticks. After playing with it for a while, I wondered if the support was intentional or accidental.

Consider the following button presses in a CH Flightstick Pro

1Button Button   Keyboard     Button
2Number Position Key          Combo
3
43210
5   x - Trigger  Enter
6  x  - Left     U/Ctrl
7 x   - Right    R
8x    - Middle   .
9xxxx - Up       W            0123
10x xx - Right    Shift F10    01 3
11  xx - Left     Enter/Joy 0  01
12 xxx - Down     S            012

The CH Flightstick Pro has a unique way of encoding button presses to support the 4-way hat switch. Each discrete button will not register in combination with another button. The hat switch positions, are button combinations. In this way compatibility with games that do not know about the Flightstick Pro is maintained. Note that there are eight combinations remaining which are not supported on a standard CH Flightstick Pro.

Lucasarts' support is weird for these games and the CDROM version of X-Wing.. First, it does not support the Throttle wheel on the Pro, which uses pot 2 on the joystick connector. In TIE Fighter, pressing button 1 and pulling up and down on the joystick sets the throttle. Second, some of the combinations are odd, especially the left and right positions. The right position, Shift F10 (lasers to shields) would make a lot more sense if the left position were mapped to Shift F9 (shields to lasers).

Nonetheless, the support seems to be intentional. I tried the hat switch button combinations using a Gravis Gamepad in its 4 button mode, and while they worked they were difficult to activate. Additionally, pressing fewer buttons which each hat switch position reports would not activate the special functions.

Neither version of X-Wing nor the floppy version of TIE Fighter will support the hat switch of a Thrustmaster FCS. That hat switch uses pot 2 to present five discrete resistance values which a game is to interpret as hat positions. TIE Fighter CDROM does support the Thrustmaster Throttle.