I'm wondering, might the RANGE constant be directly related to the dosbox cycles setting? Maybe if we can determine the calculation to convert cycles to RANGE, we won't need to add the settings to the configuration file?!
No, the calculation is time based, and seems reasonably cycle-independent, although I'm not surprised really old games (that run too fast when dosbox is set to more cycles) would have a problem, since they rely on the system running at a certain speed. With the games I've tried with my patch, I can calibrate the stick once and then crank the cycles up and down without needing to recalibrate. With WC3, for example, I calibrated at 38000 cycles and then drove it clear up to 70000 (which nearly maxes out my CPU with cockpits turned on) without needing to recalibrate the joystick. This is very different from the behavior I saw beforehand, and was what I was hoping for.
On the other side, maybe not every game could cope with every analog joystick.
In my experience, this was the case. Some games didn't work with my joysticks very well - they wouldn't reach the extremes, or they wouldn't find the center correctly. Unless it was some other aspect of my system configuration, which is possible, or that the games just don't generally work, which would suck. It could also have been that my joysticks were cheap pieces of junk. I did think that there would be a value between 50000 and 100000 (so between 100k ohms and 200k ohms) that would work with "everything", but that doesn't seem to be the case.