hmm does it pause or "hang" ?
the hang is a known bug/programming error in duke 2

It just pauses if I hit the trigger again it unpauses. Makes the game real hard to play 🙄

Actually the game plays fine if I use the keyboard commands. It is only the joystick button 1 that makes it pause.

did you try a cvs version of dosbox ?
as there were quite some improvements in the joystick code.
See the development forum (one of the top posts) for details on how to get it

Not yet I did look into that a little but I don't really know much about the CVS system. I will check and see if I can figure out how it works. I did download some precomplied stuff but was not sure about it. I will give it a try with the precompiled stuff and see if I can figure out how to use CVS since this has caused me greif in the past 😳

I tired it with a precompiled CVS version with the same effect. This was complied on 06/23/05. Its in Korean as far as the text and stuff goes. I notice in the readme that you can't complie with VC++ 6.0. What compliers for Win XP does work? Can you complie under Linux and and build an exe for windows? This is probably the wrong forum for these kinds of questions. 😊

After digging around I found that MinGW should work so I reinstalled that. Was not able to get the SDL library to install though. Is CygWin easier to use under Win XP ?

if you used a cvs compile then there is no need to compile the cvs yourselves.
that's one of the reasons I recommended them.

Just so I understand what exactely do you mean by CVS compile ? 😊 I would still like to get the thing to compile as I used to be a programmer. Now I am a system engineer 😳 So I don't do as much code 🙄

He means that there are a lot of already-compiled-from-CVS binaries floating around.

I'm a professional software engineer, and got a working MinGW/MSYS environment that I build DOSBox (and other projects) in, but it was a pain! The MinGW/MSYS team spread things out over too many files, so it's hard to tell which ones you need and in which order to install them. Then you need to get all sorts of extra stuff like SDL and maybe DirectX headers and libs.

That's what I thought. Anyway I got the darn thing to complie and guess what the joystick works now. Your right about MigGW/MSYS it is not entirely clear what you need to do to get it to work right. I got SDL set up now but there is still some question about SDL_sound. I grabbed the source and built it under MigGW/MSYS and the DosBox does have sound. Still need to grab the SDL_png and SDL_ipx. ALso the exec I built was bigger than that one that came with the 0.63 but I think I saw something about it builds with debugging info ? I have used MigGW before but it was to build HalfLife stuff Bots I think but it went away when I built a new system. VC++ 6.0 also got left out in the cold. I have not messed with .net as It offended me for some reason. I much prefer the GNU C environment but I guess that is what MigGW/MSYS is more or less. Had to read way too much info to get it all put togather. Ugh too much like work 🤣

I think SDL_sound is only needed for capturing DOSBox sound output to a file. I don't know what SDL_png is, but libpng is needed for screenshot support (that was a pain too - it needs zlib and both libpng and zlib are a pain to install in MinGW/MSYS)

MinGW/MSYS is exactly what you describe: A Win32 port of GNU tools, including GCC, make, bash, autoconf, etc. so that you can compile Unix/Linux-oriented apps more easily on Win32. Cygwin does the same thing but they like to make you include Cygwin DLLs with the apps you build in it (bleh).

I probably meant libpng 😢 I guess I just get a little carried away when I mess with these things. I like to get everything working once I start messing with it. I have messed with Cygwin before as I needed it for something or the other 😕

Big executable:

1strip --strip-unneeded src/dosbox.exe

It's indeed debugging info. configure adds that option to CFLAGS unless you specify your own.

I'll have to try that 😀 I just managed to get the source with CVS 😳 That is not the most user friendly thing I have ever used. 😮

it's a hard to find game.
Therefore you are on your own.
fortunate reading the joystick ports can only happen on 2 ways
either directly or using the bios. it shouldn't be hard to figure out which one is used