I am trying to play the game with an original Gravis Gamepad controller.
I got it to work flawlessly for JJ2, but I'm having some issues getting it to work with the first game.

It IS the original one with the 15 pin joystick thing on the back, I have that connected to a USB adapter which connects it to my pc. All the games I've tried work with it except for this one. The game detects it, but whenever I go to the options to set the "joystick" up, it asks me to rotate the joystick so that it's in the circle, but it spazzes out and goes all over the place. When I press a button, it asks me if it's the Gravis gamepad, then closes and starts going lightning fast between the game options and prevents me from being able to select anything. Changing the joystick to "none" in DOSBox sets it back to normal, but I keep getting the weird calibration issue. Can someone help me figure this out, please?

Try tweaking the timed intervals setting in your config. Pixelships has a tutorial on how to finagle the , or alternately [url=https://youtu.be/0nVjB9hSoJI]you can just map the keyboard keys to your joypad.

This helped. Very useful dosbox tweaking, thanks!
Whoever comes across this and wants to get a controller or Gravis Gamepad working with the ORIGINAL Jazz Jackrabbit, do the following:

1. Go into your installation folder, go to the file "dosbox_jazz.conf" and edit it with the notepad.
2. Go all the way down until you find where it mentions stuff about the Joystick.
3. Change "joystick type=auto" to "joystick type=fcs" without the quotes.
4. Directly underneath it, change "timed=true" to "timed=0" without the quotes.
5. Save this, plug your gamepad/joystick/whatever into the pc, and run the game.
6. Go into the settings and hit "Joystick setup".
7. It will show the red square as what the game is detecting, so to move it to the center; Move the d-pad or analog stick in a circular motion, completely around the center. Once you finish this, the square should go back to the center.
8. It'll ask if it's a gravis gamepad or not. Answer accordingly.
9 Save the settings.
10. Play the game! Hopefully, this helped anyone that had a similar issue to the one I was having. I have seen some youtube videos from a while back that had the same issue.

@andrewkjo
Thx!