Controller buttons getting double mapped

Firstly my apologies if this is the wrong place to ask about this.
I'm having a hell of a time trying to figure out my controller for both Parallel and Mupen64.

In both emulators it seems that the face buttons of my dual shock style cheap e-bay controller are being bound both to A/B AND to the c-buttons, so the 4 directions are bound to the 4 buttons but the bottom and left buttons are A and B respectively. At the same time the right stick also works to be ONLY the c-buttons.

I understand there is supposed to be a way to have L2/R2 act as a toggle button to make the face buttons be the c-buttons but that does nothing.

I haven fiddled with as many settings as i can find and nothing seems to fix this.

I don't have any similar issues in any other cores for other consoles so i'm not sure whats going on with my N64 emulation.
Maybe there's just something glaringly obvious that I've missed?

No files, tests, or entry points are mentioned. Start by reproducing the controller mapping in Parallel and Mupen64 with the reported dual-shock-style controller, then inspect the input-mapping path and L2/R2 toggle behavior. Done means the face buttons are not simultaneously mapped to A/B and the c-buttons, while the right stick retains the intended c-button mapping.