I'm also having trouble in Wing Commander: Privateer, exactly as described in this thread. Joystick Deadzone problem

Another thread linked to in this one suggests that there's just something about Saitek sticks that makes them work poorly in DOSBox. However the OP was using a Thrustmaster stick so I'm not sure that's the issue.

0.74-* offers only the timed true/false as option, which does change the joystick behaviour a lot.
If that doesn't solve it, you could try a SVN build, like the ECE build which offers a deadzone setting and an option to work nice with joysticks that have an analogue stick that can only move in a circle (unlike old joysticks that moved in a square)

Hello, thanks for the reply! I'm using ECE, though I hadn't tried the deadzone setting before. I think I just copied over my old configs so I didn't see the new joystick settings. But yeah holy cow, after setting the deadzone to zero I think it handles a lot better! For Privateer I tried using AntiMicroX to emulate a mouse with the joystick which worked pretty well, but setting DOSBox's deadzone to zero and using the joystick the normal way seems to be slightly more responsive. It's not perfect, but good enough and this way I don't have to unplug my actual mouse to keep the game from getting confused 🤣.

So yeah tl;dr that worked great, thanks for the tip, and Merry Christmas!