I just bought Privateer and and right now I am not able to play it.

I tried my X52 joystick and the 360 pad. The former had a BIG deadzone, the latter had a smaler one but still was NOT smooth.

I searched the internet and read about mouse control. I really wanted to play this gem again so I tried it. Sadly, this isn't acceptable either.

I have no calibration issues, the game works fine...all that's missing are PRECISE controls. Anyone?

I've already tried Taewong's build but it didn't change anything regarding the deadzone problems.

Honestly, the game is pretty easy just using keyboard controls once you get the hang of it, and build up the armor guns on your ship.

That may be true. But that way I won't get any "space flight feeling" ©

:(

I've had the same problem with that atrocious deadzone. Unfortunately, I know of no way to to get rid of it. Fortunately, you do get used to it and can still have a blast with the game, but controls will NEVER be as precise as, say, Digital Combat Simulator.

There are various ways of working around the default deadzone, e.g. using the DOSBox Mapper (Ctrl+F1) to change the controller to send keyboard or mouse inputs instead. You could even use an external tool such as Xpadder for binding the keyboard/mouse inputs since it lets you set the sensitivity and deadzone of each axis exactly the way you want it.

Don't disable DOSBox's joystick support as part of your tinkering--Privateer's music does not play correctly with it disabled. You can unbind/rebind the joystick inputs in the DOSBox Mapper to achieve the same result without affecting the music.

Ok, but mapping keyboard keys to a joystick via mapping software only allows 4 way movement, doesn' it? I mean, up, down, left and right...no diagonal movement.

Setting timed=false in the dosboxprivateer.conf does a lot to improve joystick input, though early WC games alsways had control issues due to the iffy game engine.

Hmm, that doesn't seem to work. I've tried unbinding all joystick axes (and buttons, to be safe), I've tried binding them all to "left shift", no matter, when I start with joystick support the cursor will drift anyway!
Any solution to that?

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Here's what I've learned trying to run privateer in dosbox on a modern machine:
there's basically two ways to run the game:
cycles=6500 (or thereabouts, fixed cycles anyway)
or
cycles=auto

if you pick a fixed cycle rate of ~6500, this will enable you to use a joystick (or gamepad in my case) without the cursor drifting on its own, in other words the game becomes "playable" with joystick.
However, this comes at a price:
- the game will not run very smoothly in general, but will be okay to play while not much is happening
- as soon as you have more than ~3 ships around you, or a base/planet nearby, or you approach a jump point, or you are in an asteroid field, or lots of shots are being fired (in other words: lots of objects are drawn) the effective fps goes completely down the drain. Since these situations are quite frequent the further in the game you progress, the more "difficult" (==unplayable) it becomes.

If, instead, you use "cycles = auto", the game will play *almost* perfectly in terms of fps. No choppiness, no lag, all in all a little it may run just a little too fast, but it's a great fun experience throughout.
But this, too, has its drawbacks:
- you cannot use a joystick (cursor will drift no matter what joystick settings you try)
- music playback will be strangely slowed down while in space
- keyboard controls are choppy, much like with joystick, the game has a built-in deadzone that makes it very frustrating to get any kind of aiming going quickly. but this is a problem with the game itself and has always been this way, not a dosbox issue.

My reply is a bit late (I haven't been here lately), but anyway...

It sounds like your particular controller may be sending a slight motion signal (just enough to trigger movement in DOSBox). If your controller doesn't have its own configuration software for adjusting the deadzone the best you can do is to set a bigger deadzone through a third-party tool (instead of the DOSBox Mapper) and use that to play in keyboard/mouse mode with the game's joystick support disabled.

There is a spaceflight music speed fix (see the "October 13th 2013" section) which allows the music to play correctly when the game's own joystick support is disabled.