Thanks for all the info

Wow yeah, those old Logitech pads are freaky! The ones I had definitely had circular gates. In fact in hindsight the ones I had were probably designed as third party PS1 controllers and just had the internals adapted to produce a directinput PC version. I can't recall how they showed up in the calibration on Windows 95 though so I'm not sure whether it was "circle inside a square" or "circle clipped into a square".

I agree that was definitely the problem with PoP, it's just that I'd always assumed it was poor programming on the part of Ubisoft since the only PC gamepads I'd ever had had circular/octagonal gates. I still maintain that a circular gate is a more sensible design for a game where you're controlling a person as what you need to measure is a vector from the centre of the stick (direction and distance).
If the game needs to reach the corner of the square for you to run diagonally then you're moving it further from the centre than you need to to run forwards and that strikes me as a strange way to design controls, square range or not.

I'll have to logitech to my list of shitty websites and they're products don't seem as good as they were in the past apart from maybe a steering wheel.

The pads I remember had circles including logitechs flightsticks but the calibration area was a box.
Which might cause the opposite problem from the prince of persia where the actual input is neither a square nor a circle giving inconsistent aiming depending on how the game handles that information.

I am not even sure how that is supposed to work...

Can you remember the exact models of such (DirectInput) gamepads and flightsticks with a round range of movement?

I just checked the three flightsticks that I still own (from the oldest to the newest):

Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro
Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2
Thrustmaster T.16000m (this I bought only a couple of years ago)

and they all clearly have a square range of movement. As did the CH Flightstick which was my first PC joystick.

It sounds logical that older PC DirectInput gamepads (at least those I've seen and bought in the past, like the aforementioned Logitech Dual Action gamepad) chose to use a square range of movement, in order to stay backwards compatible with PC analog flightsticks, and games that supported them.

Console analog gamepads (PSX, N64, PS2, XBox etc.) had a life of their own with a round range of movement, and these two conflicting worlds merged later when Microsoft brought the XBox 360 console gamepad with its round analog range of movement to Windows, to be its de facto standard XInput gamepad.

The logitech wingman look like they are circle. Saitek P380 is a gamepad with circle.

Unnessecary since there are Xinput wrappers.