Edit : Turns out mine was broken but since I did manage to work out some information about it I thought I'd post it here, in case it helps someone.

This is a 4 axis 4 button joystick. The 3 red buttons are standard josytick buttons and the 4th button is at thumb position halfway up the stick. It looks like more than it is, but it's just simply a button.

The hat is unusual, it's not analogue but sends an analogue signal. Essentially it's like controlling an on-screen pointer with a gamepad, hold up to keep moving up and hold down to keep moving down. So if you held the hat up and to the left eventually the joystick would send X:0 Y:0, and if you held it down and to the right the numbers would increase. I'm not really sure what use this is.

The "crown" sends a combination of the 4 buttons. Up sends all 4. Down sends 1-3, Right sends 1,2,4 and Left sends 1,2. I don't know what use this is.

There is also a tiny black button diagonally below the hat, a slider switch and 4 toggle switches. My understanding is that these are used to program macros on the joystick itself. As far as I can determine there is no way to send anything other than what the joystick can already send.

Suncom had more complex sticks than the Raptor which had the same physical format, but they also had a PS/2 passthrough. The passthrough means that the buttons and so on could send meaningful keyboard commands, rather than what I think is useless from this stick. They seem to have made this as a cut down stick in the hope people buy it thinking it's more than it is, with the logic of "Well the extra buttons have to do something, just make them do something, anything".

I don't think it's any more useful than a standard 2 axis 4 button stick. I would not recommend it. The other models, particularly with the PS/2 passthrough look to be much more suitable for flight sims. But this model seems to offer no practical functionality beyond what a simpler stick offers.

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I've tried to play some Tie Fighter today but it's recognising the hat as the joystick, and the wrong button as the fire button.

I'm using a Suncom Raptor 15e in Win98 (DOS) on a Pentium MMX on the gameport of an Orpheus.

I did hear there's a patch and I managed to track down tiejoycd.exe but the patch makes no difference to it.

I'm wondering if there's any third party utilities that might help, or if there's some other way of getting tie fighter to use the correct inputs?