After I finally managed to get my MS bundled Sidewinder version of Mech2 working thanks to some excellent posts and slight revisions. I have discovered that I cannot get my new joystick to work or map properly.

First the setup:
Linux Suse10.3 x86_64 running on Lenovo X61 Thinkpad 2.2gHz core2 duo. 10.3 Suse Dosbox release with DBoxFE running the easy stuff.

The problem:
After thinking it was a completely Mech2 issue, I went to the README and all other resources I could find and was eventually led to remap the joystick through the keymapper. It was here that I discovered that I can't detect the hat controls and suspect other issues may be occurring behind the scenes.

It seems that no matter which joystick configuration I try (auto, fcs, ch, etc.) the hat controls are flaky at best and the MECH2, game based, configuration utilities for any of the available joysticks proves useless.

However, the joystick does work completely as expected in Linux and through tools such as jstest.

The Questions:
Has anybody worked this or an issue similar to this with any success?
Has anybody seen or attempted to emulate a legacy joystick such as the win95 sidewinder (which I still have but cannot use on my new computer) and port the joystick information directly into a running program via a separate path?

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.