HELP!!

Hi Guys,
Im after some help. Im considering downloading all the Wing Commander Series as they were great games but want to know if anyone already has done so.
Do they work ok or is there a lot of configuration to be done.
Can I use a new USB joystick or do I need to get an old retro one.

I played these games in the 90s on my old 4MB ram computer and they were really addictive. GOG.com is the only site ive seen where you can download these games for windows OS higher than windows 95/msdos without having to download dosbox and mess around with configurations. I would appreciate any feed back from any members who have alreay downloaded these games and played them.

cheers

Steve

They all work just fine without the need of tweaking and you can play just fine with good ol' keyboard.

Thanks for info, I remember using a joystick which was much better than my friend who used a keyboard. Is this version of game compatible with joysticks??

Yes, it is, although in the case of WC 1 & 2, only the first two buttons are supported, and in the case of WC 3, only the first four buttons are supported (I think).

WC 1 & 2 also only support two axis (no Z-axis or throttle), which I believe also applies to WC 3.

Not sure about WC 4/Prophecy. As far as I can remember, the version of WC 4 here is the Windows version, so it should have slightly better joystick support - I might be wrong though.

All the games work fine out of the box. They come bundled with a pre-configured DOSBox, you just have to run a shortcut like with any other Windows game (that you don't start through a client, that is). And DOSBox should recognize modern joysticks perfectly and make the games recognize them. I for one didn't have any problems with my USB joystick. Just plug it in, run the game and everything should work fine out of the box. If it doesn't you should easily find solutions in the Wing Commander subforums on GOG.

And as for the button issues jamyskis mentioned: well, that's the games' default configs, the games just support only 2-4 buttons. BUT with DOSBox you can easily rebind some of the keyboard shortcuts to your joystick. You can find more information about remapping commands in DOSBox here. But all in all it's pretty simple. Just press CTRL+F1 at any point in DOSBox and you get a simple interface that allows you to select keys/buttons/axes and then choose what they are supposed to do. So technically joysticks are even more useful now than they were back then in DOS. Well, the mapper program allows you to map all sorts of things to a stick/gamepad so that's not a big issue. I don't know whether you can map stuff to more buttons than the emulated joystick type has (has been a while since I did that kind of stuff in DOSBox) but you can certainly use at least six buttons and map keyboard commands to those that the game doesn't use natively.