Software to make iPac4 send Xbox360 inputs?

[Domarius]

(UPDATE: See my solution further down)

I hope this is the right forum.

I had a search, and I have a feeling this is possibly an old question, but at the same time I couldn't find a straight answer...

IPAC being interpreted as a keyboard is all well and good for emulators where you can set any keyboard key to control any controller input in its control setup menu.

But I really want my 4 player cabinet to also work with the HUGE amount of awesome local 4 player games on Steam.

Eg.;
Towerfall
Duck Game
Hidden In Plain Sight
Speed Runners
The list goes on...

But all these games want Xbox 360 controllers and don't have options for re-mapping the keys.

That's great, I just assumed when I bought all this that between Joy2Key, AutoHotKey, and XPadder, there would be a way of configuring the IPAC outputs to be interpreted as Xbox360 inputs... turns out this is not the case...

• Joy2Key maps gamepad inputs to keyboard inputs (the inverse of what I want)
• XPadder maps gamepad inputs to xbox360 inputs (only half of what I want)
• And while AutoHotKey has a function for sending generic joystick button presses, this isn't good enough for games that expect an Xbox 360 controller
• (And x360ce is just a crappy version of Xpadder)

So are my findings true?  Are my dreams for having all my favourite 4 player Steam games on this system well and truly shattered?

[mimic]

...nvm

[BadMouth]

See the Xinput stickied post in the software forum.

[shaolindrunkard]

I hope this is the right forum.

I had a search, and I have a feeling this is possibly an old question, but at the same time I couldn't find a straight answer...

IPAC being interpreted as a keyboard is all well and good for emulators where you can set any keyboard key to control any controller input in its control setup menu.

But I really want my 4 player cabinet to also work with the HUGE amount of awesome local 4 player games on Steam.

Eg.;
Towerfall
Duck Game
Hidden In Plain Sight
Speed Runners
The list goes on...

But all these games want Xbox 360 controllers and don't have options for re-mapping the keys.

That's great, I just assumed when I bought all this that between Joy2Key, AutoHotKey, and XPadder, there would be a way of configuring the IPAC outputs to be interpreted as Xbox360 inputs... turns out this is not the case...

• Joy2Key maps gamepad inputs to keyboard inputs (the inverse of what I want)
• XPadder maps gamepad inputs to xbox360 inputs (only half of what I want)
• And while AutoHotKey has a function for sending generic joystick button presses, this isn't good enough for games that expect an Xbox 360 controller
• (And x360ce is just a crappy version of Xpadder)

So are my findings true?  Are my dreams for having all my favourite 4 player Steam games on this system well and truly shattered?

So Domarius, it seems we are of a like mind. I'm also building a 4 player cabinet for games like TowerFall, Duckgame ect. In fact its almost done, and I should be posting pictures and possibly videos within the next week or so of it up and running. Its a pedestal style cabinet but anyway... So I did extensive research before starting this project and found that there is no easy solution to having all of these games work other than actually using a hacked xbox 360 controller... After doing more research I settled on this controller, the MadCatz Brawl Pad.

There are 2 important things about this controller, #1 its easy to hack and #2 is that it has a switch on the back of it that lets you make the D-pad act like the left analog stick.... Now this is very important because some of those 4 player games we love don't support the D-pad at all. Hidden in plain site for instance does not support the D-pad, nor does Overcooked and a few others. With this switch I can play all of those games. So I am wiring that switch to an external toggle switch on on my cabinet so that I can swap between digital and analog. The other good thing about using this controller is it works with every emulator I've thrown at it but also (almost) every steam game. I say almost because I have run into a few games that were built with the Unity engine that for some reason with the Brawl Pad, the controls for up and down are inverted don't ask me why... My plan is to make a switch that will invert the up/down directions at some point but for now there aren't many games that have that issue so I'm gonna skip it for now.

Hope this helps you...

[DeLuSioNal29]

Here's the topic everyone was referring to for the software hack: [Edit: The file is gone since the new server was put online.  PM me if you need the file]
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,96377.0.html

Here's a link to a hardware solution (although your mileage may vary):
http://ultimarc.com/console.html

DeL

[Domarius]

(Original thread title " Software to make iPac4 send Xbox360 inputs?" which I changed after I found the solution)

I know it's 4 years since I posted this, but I wanted to update it with my very successful solution (thanks to the genius of my partner, it astounds me the stuff she thinks of).  The truth is the solution was reached not long after posting this, and I never updated the thread. I'm checking in again with a different question but I want to update this thread for everyone else's benefit.

My partner remembered me talking about knock-off XBox 360 gamepads  you could buy on ebay - they were very cheap, and worked perfectly, except the only complaints people had were the physical build (trigger responsiveness, etc.) .

She said just buy 4 of them cheaply off eBay (about $12 each if I recall correctly), de-case them and solder the inputs directly - we're just using the circuit board of it, ignoring the physical properties of the gamepad. And you know what - it works great!  I de-regulated my IPAC to just be inputs for the general menu buttons on my custom arcade buttons (such a sad job for a powerful piece of hardware), and the actual 4 player controls are each wired up to the de-cased internals of 4 knock-off XBox 360 gamepads.  Each player has an arcade joystick that is mapped to the d-pad, and also 2 arcade buttons underneath the joypad, and 6 arcade buttons for actual gameplay.  Might be overkill but it supports everything, even 4 player steam games. (And the analogue sticks are just doing nothing.)

The trick to soldering the bare wire to the contacts under the rubber buttons, is flux.  Without flux, the solder just doesn't hold, it's a flat surface with no other way to get the wire to hold.  But if you clean off the contacts, apply flux liberally to the wire and contact area, and then solder on with a tiny bit of solder, the connection is rock solid.

This is a setup that maps to any emulator (MAME, Retroarch...) and any Steam game (Duck Game, Knight Squad...) because while only some games support the keyboard, EVERYTHING supports XBox 360 gamepads.