[Dave Flowerday]

Most (if not all) Sidewinder joysticks use a serial protocol that will not work with the IFI equipment. They end up using one of the button signals as a data line and another button signal as a clock. They then send a serial stream of information containing all the information about the analog & digital readings of the joystick over these pins. This is the reason that they warn you that the joystick will not work with MS-DOS - it requires a special driver to decode the serial stream, and there isn't one written for MS-DOS.