I'm encountering an add issue while trying to get my joystick working through DOSBox, and it's unclear to me whether it's a problem with DOSBox, the game itself (Mechwarrior 2), or something else entirely.

I have my physical joystick mapped to a virtual joystick by way of Joystick Gremlin and VJoy, and DOSBox is taking the virtual joystick as input using the 4axis joysticktype. In the Mapper, everything seems to be bound the way I want it, including 4 buttons, but no hat switch.

In game, however, I discovered rather by accident that if I press two of the mapped VJoy buttons at the same time, it's being interpreted as the 'left' direction of a hat switch (noting again that I didn't intend to have anything bound to a hat at all, much less some odd two-button combination).

To be honest, I'm not really sure how to go about diagnosing this. If the game is getting a hat input, it's presumably coming from DOSBox, but there's no hat mapping configured so far as I can tell. But by the same token, I also can't find anything in the game configuration that would cause two non-hat inputs to be interpreted as a hat. So my questions, then, would be (1) Is this a known issue of any kind, and if so, how do I address it? and (2) If it isn't a known issue, then any suggestions on how I might determine whether it's a DOSBox issue vs a Mechwarrior 2 issue?

Thanks