Well your generally looking at 2 genre's
Flight Sims and Space Sims you could include motorcycle sims and at a pinch racing games obiously a wheel is better but you can drive with a stick I did myself for years
If you wants specific suggestions
Flight Sims :
anything by
Microprose : f15 strike eagle 1 to 3, f117 stealth fighter, gunship 2000
anything witth the janes label : janes f15, 18, usaf, israeli air force, longbow 1+2
E.A : u.s navy fighters, fighers anthology, advanced tactical fighters
DiD: tfx, ef2000 f22 total airwar, f22 adf

Space sims :
xwing/tie fighter
wingcommander series
freespace series
descent series
tachyon

heres a list of flight sims
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/simulation/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/windows/simulation/

that should keep you going

Davros wrote:

Well your generally looking at 2 genre's Flight Sims and Space Sims you could include motorcycle sims and at a pinch racing game […]
Show full quote

Well your generally looking at 2 genre's
Flight Sims and Space Sims you could include motorcycle sims and at a pinch racing games obiously a wheel is better but you can drive with a stick I did myself for years
If you wants specific suggestions
Flight Sims :
anything by
Microprose : f15 strike eagle 1 to 3, f117 stealth fighter, gunship 2000
anything witth the janes label : janes f15, 18, usaf, israeli air force, longbow 1+2
E.A : u.s navy fighters, fighers anthology, advanced tactical fighters
DiD: tfx, ef2000 f22 total airwar, f22 adf

Space sims :
xwing/tie fighter
wingcommander series
freespace series
descent series
tachyon

heres a list of flight sims
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/simulation/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/windows/simulation/

that should keep you going

Wow that's perfect, thank you very much!!

I never had a PC joystick growing up and from time to time noticed that quite a few older games have support for joysticks or gamepads (DOS games up through early Windows Xp before I succumbed to World of Warcraft in 2005 and stopped playing anything else for a decade) so I figured that someone somewhere would have a list of games that make good use of a joystick.

If you had to pick your top 3 favorite pre-2005ish games to play using a joystick would you say those flight sims are probably the best ones to start with?

Sorry for the delay,
my top 3 would be :
FreeSpace 1+ 2 (awesome witha force feedback joystick)
Advanced Tactical Fighters (with Nato Fighters Addon)
Descent

Edit: I had the precision Pro and it was gameport but came with an usb adapter
theres a picture of the adapter here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SideWinder
maybe your missing one ?

edit: are you sure you have a precision 2 ? They seem to be usb

Davros wrote:

Sorry for the delay, my top 3 would be : FreeSpace 1+ 2 (awesome witha force feedback joystick) Advanced Tactical Fighters (with […]
Show full quote

Sorry for the delay,
my top 3 would be :
FreeSpace 1+ 2 (awesome witha force feedback joystick)
Advanced Tactical Fighters (with Nato Fighters Addon)
Descent

Edit: I had the precision Pro and it was gameport but came with an usb adapter
theres a picture of the adapter here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SideWinder
maybe your missing one ?

edit: are you sure you have a precision 2 ? They seem to be usb

Howdy and first of all thank you for the suggestions!

It is a Precision Pro now that I look at it - and just as you described it is a gameport device but included a gameport-to-USB adapter. So far the only game I have tried it on was Descent 3 (on my modern rig via USB of course) and it seems to work great. It was listed as new in box and seems to fit that, although it smelled like cigarette smoke so I had to wipe it all down thoroughly with some lysol wipes to get the smell off. All in all not bad for ~ $40 shipped I would say.