Mamehooker and win XP - compatibility with custom Xbox360 pad drivers

[baritonomarchetto]

Hi,

i am trying to have Cannonball, Model 2 emu and MAME working with the xbox360 pad the wheel of my racing cab is interfaced with.

No problems at all with the analog pots, whichever is the driver i use: i am dealing with the rumble motors and trying to let them work with those emus.

Mame outputs can be sent to the Pc peripherals with mamehooker (really?  ), Cannonball and model 2 both have some FF support and there are evidencies that they can work with some custom drivers (a guy reported this on Cannonball forum and BadMouth had Model 2 "rumbling" on a xbox 360 controller).

Now, assuming that these custom drivers can actually let Cannonball and Model 2 output something to the rumble motors, it looks like Mamehooker, which works perfectly with Xbox360 default XP drivers, stop working with custom drivers (i also gave a go to XBCD360 drivers, but i had the same problem with mamehooker - broken rumble support).

Considering that from the new drivers GUI you can actually have the rumble motors spinning, there should be something wrong in the "dialog" between mamehooker and the new driver.

>>Here<< is a direct link to the download of the sources, just to let you Howard or anyone skilled with code "reading" eventually spot where the problem could lie...

any help would be much appreciated 

[baritonomarchetto]

Made some additional search and the guy who developed the custom drivers for the pad wrote also a little driver to activate the rumble support in Xinput (disabled by default in microsoft drivers).

It's very likely that this little driver is included in the "main" driver, so probably the compatibility issue arises in this little part of code... any thoughts?

[baritonomarchetto]

The "force feedback" driver alone made my emus crash. Not sure why it did that, but it's a nono 

BUT

The tests I made today are encouraging: i reinstalled the complete drivers for XP and noticed that mamehooker was able to interact with the pad motors via "direct X FF" and not "Xinput FF": in other words those drivers convert the Xinput in direct input. Not that bad in the end.

A question arises then: with Xinput FF i could change the strenght of the motors by changing the two latest values of the string (one for each motor):

xia 1 %s% 30000 30000

with DirectX FF even if i change the value (the same for both the motors) i have no tuning of the speed at all

ffa 1 %s% -1 0 0 10000

is it possible to change the strenght by changing the "duration" (not sure what is the unit of measure for this call) and "Xoffset/Yoffset"? What exactly they affect?

Thanks 

[baritonomarchetto]

Just found the notes Howard kindly wrote for mamehooker users in, believe it or not, "readme" file 

I found some answer to my questions, but Direct Input FF doesn't act as it should because whatever "strenght" value i set (even "0") the motor rumbles full strenght.

In addition, reading the script examples i was almost sure that writing

ffa 1 %s% -1 0 0 10000

was equivalent to

ffa 1 0 -1 0 0 10000|ffa 1 1 -1 0 0 10000

(i am toying with this because having not the control over the strenght with the "strenght" paramenter i was trying to set some lower frequency to some weak output i.e. Outrun)

but is not ... i am somehow OT asking this, but should those two be equivalent?

Back IT, for future reference: with my setup (Win XP SP3, wired xbox controller) XBCD360 drivers are replaced with the default drivers when restarting the SO. This doesn't happens using the drivers I linked on top of this topic 

Thanks