I-Pac4 Help: Hybrid mode? Xinput+Keyboard

[smileyhowler]

Hey All!
I'm working on my first build; mostly done but working on making it as user friendly as possible. I have 4 player pedestal: P1/2 have 7 buttons & P3/4 have 6 buttons. I have 4 'admin' buttons. I'm using an I-pac4 on Firmware 1.56 and have been switching between Mode 1 (keyboard) and Mode 3 (Xinput) and seeing what works best for our setup. I'm a big fan of Mode 3 because this allows for not only arcade emulation but also playing some arcade style windows programs; think Cuphead and TMNT Shredder's Revenge. I've been scouring the interwebs trying to find an answer on how to accomplish this. I've heard (remember it's the internet) that it is possible to use the I-pac4 in xinput mode but still have some buttons mapped to keyboard buttons. The 4 admin buttons are wired to P3/4 buttons 7 and 8. I've found workarounds through scripts in Launch/BigBox but it does not hold up for every emulator and/or game. Would love to have these 4 buttons mapped to Esc, P, F1, etc.

Is this possible or am I dreaming?

I'm trying to stay away from x360ce and keyboard2xinput; trying to keep it simple and I've run into issues trying those out. If this is not possible with the I-pac4 I'm certainly open to other suggestions.

Appreciate any insight!

[MartyKong]

I can recommend a program called Joy2Key which will convert a joypad button to a keyboard output. I've set up my arcade for keyboard but use this program when using gamepads to work with different emulators. Hope this helps, Marty.

[midd]

not with the current configuration.  But Daniel Spies stated on one his YT videos that ultimarc is working on one.  Rpeg Electronics is now selling a hybrid Brooks Encoder board. It became available for order yesterday.

[fallacy]

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by switching modes on the iPac 4. I have an older 2009 iPac 4, so maybe things have changed since then. I built a four-player arcade cabinet and mapped each player to unique keys, then added those key mappings into MAME. That setup has worked well for me.

As for getting multiple controllers to work from a single keyboard, I’ve had some success using Keyboard Splitter (https://github.com/djlastnight/KeyboardSplitterXbox
). You can set up four Xbox controllers using one keyboard. Just start Keyboard Splitter, launch your game, and your keyboard will act like four separate controllers.

I used to have a JTAG Xbox 360 loaded with games and Xbox Live Arcade titles on a hard drive. A long time ago, I got the red ring of death, so I just tossed the hard drive in a drawer. Recently, I discovered Xenia Canary along with Xenia Manager, which makes it easy to install and manage everything. I pulled out that old hard drive, and it detected all my games and ran them on my main gaming PC just as well as the original Xbox 360. I was pretty excited, I could play games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and 3, and even Street Fighter V.

After that, I found Keyboard Splitter, which helped since Xenia doesn’t really support mapping more than one gamepad easily. But when I tried to move everything over to my MAME machine running Windows 7, it didn’t work out. The software won’t install properly, and even when I get things running, nothing scales correctly on my CRT monitor. At this point, it feels pretty much impossible for me to get PC or Xbox 360 games running the way I want on that cabinet.

[venomcole]

hello every one