I remember playing AitD 1 way back on DOSBox, and stopped playing very quickly due to the weird controls. I may have been too young to get past the learning curve, but I remember very vividly how odd the controls were and they turned me off. Are the controls really bad in this game? Do you get used to them quickly or are they a pain throughout? Please give me your opinions. Thank you.

The controls are tank-like and a little awkward id say.

The thing is that you can abuse corners to defeat almost any opponent in the game easily.
Position yourself at the corner of a door, bed, drawer or whatever and you should be able to kick enemies repeatedly as they try to go around the corner and reach you.

Combined with the fact that you can save at any time the controls shouldn't get in your way too much.

Horrible, tank like and really awkward. I would say they are worse then those of the early resident evil games. The aiming system is a pain, you have to be aimed dead straight with a hostile to hurt them. Turning around a corner is not so much of a pain though. Also, having to throw away items or put them down and walking around them gets tedious after a while. You have to remember the age of the games though.

I' have to disagree. I find them a lot better than early Resident Evil controls. Smooth and responsive, with the exception of running. I will agree however, that the aiming system is a bit difficult, and it is kinda annoying if you drop a bunch of crap and then accidentally walk over it. Again, as Bluefox said, keep in mind the age of the games.

The running is the worst part of it. You run by double-tapping - and that does only work if both the game and Dosbox feel like it.
A patch would be nice that'd either bind running to another key or to shift+arrow_up.

If you are having problems with running in dosbox, try reducing the CPU cycles to under 12k. Running shouldn't be a problem after that.

The CPU speed throws the timing out of whack. I used to have the same problem playing the AITD games on a Win 98 box with a fairly fast CPU (for the time).