Getting things to work together problem

[jarhead_1775]

I have installed Hyperspin, which I have working reasonably well.  A few emulators and roms running behind it.  The trouble is with the software that controls buttons and joysticks.  I have two wolfware howlers, LEDBlinky, HyperlaunchHQ, and ultraMap.  Each one of these seems to have a program that will map what buttons press what... Do I make them all the same?  Howler can have Joy1 or joy2 buttons... 1-9... or mapped to a keyboard...  Sorry for the noob questions, but it's super confusing to me.  Can anyone make some sense for me of what's going on?  Thanks in advance.  Btw, there are 39 total buttons and 4 ultimarc 360's which are not mapped to the howlers.  Only the buttons are wired to the howlers. 

[jarhead_1775]

Oh yeah and xpadder, too.  Is all that stuff overkill?

[jarhead_1775]

Nothin?  Not even snide remarks about my intelligence?  I expected better!

[Generic Eric]

Nothin?  Not even snide remarks about my intelligence?  I expected better!

Not everyone has hiked that mountain.

[yotsuya]

I don't think I've used 39 buttons on ALL the projects I've built combined. 

Like Eric says, you're in uncharted territory.

[lamprey]

I've never used a howler before so I don't know how it does it's business, but you really have to run a program each time to define what each button does? Are you saying it doesn't function like a joystick, meaning each button is wired up and is always button1 or button2 etc..? If it does, then you should just configure your emulator as to which button does what. If not, well.. I'll bow out and let someone with howler experience chime in.

[a1pharm]

You might want to look at the "JoyToKey" software if you are trying to get a gamepad-type device to act like a keyboard...  Other than that... 

[jarhead_1775]

So, as I learn more maybe I can be a little more specific.  The howler (a great piece of hardware, btw), takes your button input and translates it to an output for whatever you dictate.  So I have a 4 player pedestal with 7 buttons at each player.  I've instructed the howler to map those buttons as joy1 button 1, joy1 button 2.... Etc.  when I open the howler in device manager in windows, I can see the output for the buttons working correctly.  So far so good.  When I open a game on hyper spin, the games appear to work correctly for the most part.  The trouble is when I am using LEDBlinky now.  Only one set of buttons lights up (the player 2 buttons).  Now LEDBlinky has its own mapping program as well.  This is where I think I have the disconnect.  I have mapped them to tell them what is what, but I'm not sure that they're speaking the same language... How do they know what buttons are where?  I see that in xpadder, I can tell it where buttons are, but that doesn't seem really built for my application.  Also hyperlaunchHQ AND hyper spin have their own button outputs as well!  So many moving parts, I was hoping someone could help me make a little sense out of who's talking to who and who's actually in charge. 

[lordnacho]

Sounds like you just need to configure LEDBlinky
http://www.ledblinky.net/downloads/Install%20and%20Config.pdf

Try some animations in there and make sure it's lighting everything up.  Haven't tinkered with this in awhile, so can't remember exactly