I just recently attempted to run Privateer through DOSBox,...

On my laptop it runs,... not great, but runs. My desktop machine is slightly more powerful. The problem I have is that Privateer apparently doesn't like my joystick, a Gravis Xterminator Gamepad (oldstyle joyport, not USB). Removing it would be a huge pain.

Is there a command line or conf setting to tell DOSBox to ignore the joystick???

Alternatively, is there one for Privateer that anyone can remember???

Thanks...

If you want to configure any aspect of dosbox I recommend dboxfe

http://dboxfe.linuxmind.de/

At the moment it's down, but i'm sure there is a package somewhere for your distro of choice. I remember seing the SuSE package somewhere.
It allows you to keep per-game settings. Try just searching on google, your game name + dosbox. There may be other people who have had this problem.

I've seen dboxfe,... even downloaded it, but haven't used it. I usually prefer to manually configure my game settings in dosbox or winex/cedega...

My problem is that I don't see anything in the man page or anything regarding making dosbox NOT use a particular piece of hardware other than network stuff (modems, ethernet, etc). Apparently, this is not configureable...

I guess Privateer will only be working on my laptop for now.

Actually, I was looking through the settings and dosboxfe doesn't have that.

But I figured out how you can disable it. I was about to write you a patch and send it to dosbox when I noticed in the sources they use SDL.
They have no way of getting news of your joystick outside of SDL. I recommend you do the following.

Compile SDL yourself without joystick support.
I suggest you save it into say.. /home/username/nojoystick/
You can do that by adding --disable-joystick --prefix=/home/username/nojoystick/ to the SDL configure file.
Next compile dosbox against the new SDL library and install it in the same place.
You can do this with,

./configure --with-sdl-prefix=/home/username/nojoystick/ --prefix=/home/username/nojoystick

Not sure if the --with-sdl-prefix needs /home/username/nojoystick/lib or the above, but just look at what SDL creates in that directory.
That will make dosbox incapable of seing your joystick, and will only make the version installed there behave that way. Like this you still have your old version in case you want joystick support.

Naw,... I'm not going through all that trouble and "breaking" a perfectly good SDL implementation to "fix" a joystick problem in one old DOS game...

But thanks though...