I've been using a gamepad (PS2 Dualshock II) along with J2K to play through the games, and it got me through the first two games in the main series without any problems. 3 I had to use the mouse for, but there has since been a fix for that, and I'll likely use my gamepad for that as well.

At first, it seemed like Privateer was actually working better with the gamepads than the previous games were... However, then I got into combat... Apparently, it sees any buttons beyond the initial two as repeats of the first two buttons. Meaning that although I can still have them do their J2K commands, it'll simultaneously be doing one of the other two commands as well, which simply breaks the game for me (I don't want my lasers shooting every time I need to decelerate). It forces me to either play with mouse or keyboard (neither of which is really a good option for Wing Commander), or to abandon it altogether and skip to another title.

Is there any way to fix this?

Privateer only supports two buttons and two axes so GOG configured it with button wrapping.

Edit the DOSBox configuration file (dosboxPRIV.conf) and change buttonwrap=true to buttonwrap=false

You can then map the additional buttons using the DOSBox Mapper (Ctrl+F1) or JoyToKey if you prefer.

Thank you, this seems to have fixed it!

I seem to be having the same problem, and I am also using JoyToKey. However, changing the config file buttonwrap=true to buttonwrap=false hasn't made any change at all that I can notice.

Anytime I use button one on my controller it fires lasers and activates my JoyToKey setting. Is there something else that has to be done first?