joystick

it worked for me when i played Vanilla FL, didn't try with crossfire

yes you can use a joystick, but not for flight commands. the time delay is too big, and a joystick has to be translated to keycodes, so you don't have a 'spread of values' but a on/off of a keycode.

Look at joytokey (search with google)- it has a "Toggle" push type causing the action to start when the corresponding button is pushed once, and stop when the button is pushed again.

I use it on my left hand to fly my BS while in turret mode with the right hand side mouse.

In normal mode, I use it to fire missiles, torpedos, etc while flying with my mouse..so I use the keyboard very little in normal mode.

Kind Regards