Problem with Street Fighter IV and mapping two players to keyboard encoder

[SQrL]

I have Street Fighter IV installed on my cab.  Can't seem to find a way to allow players 1 AND 2 to BOTH use the Keyboard (aka Groovy Game Gear keyboard encoder).  I am running Vista 64bit and PPJoy doesn't seem to work on that OS, so joy emulation is out (unless someone has a suggestion of alternative software).

any ideas would be much appreciated.
thanks...

[Sosetsuken]

Hey SQ, my SFIV disc should be arriving anytime soon so i'll take a look then mate!

[Sosetsuken]

It seems You can only assign 1 player to the keyboard :/  It won't let me choose a 2nd players controls if I only have a keyboard.

I'm glad I used 2 Xbox360 pads for my control panel.  PPJoy probably won't work in 64 bit Vista due to the unsigned driver it tries to install.  You might be able to get around that if you do a search for it on the net.

[HaRuMaN]

It seems You can only assign 1 player to the keyboard :/  It won't let me choose a 2nd players controls if I only have a keyboard.

Wow, that's lame... 

[Sosetsuken]

I'd be suprised if theres not a ton of hacks out for the EXE in the near future.

The thing that shits me though is I think that we have to buy the alternate costumes on the pc, through Windows Live Marketplace.

[u_rebelscum]

It seems You can only assign 1 player to the keyboard :/  It won't let me choose a 2nd players controls if I only have a keyboard.

Wow, that's lame... 

Yup.  MS (directX & XNA & XInput) makes it far easier to assign a one-to-one, device to player, relationship, than to do full remapping like mame.  (EA has had this limit since at least directX 3.0 AFAIK.)

The limit makes sense for consoles and PCs with retail controllers, but does not help BYO people, nor people who only own a keyboard.  Not much you can do besides buy a second interface like the GPwiz or u-hid, or try to convince the developers to change their methods .

[massive88]

Is there any sort of reverse Joy2Key application out there that could be used as a work around?

[Aabra]

Is there any sort of reverse Joy2Key application out there that could be used as a work around?

Yes, PPJoy should work.  The only problem is that he's using Vista64 and ppjoy doesn't work with that OS.

I'm building a cab and this was one of my major concerns.  A lot of games only let you assign 1 player to the keyboard.  This is one of the big reasons I'm going to get a couple of U360 controllers so that they appear as individual joysticks in Windows.

[Sosetsuken]

Good thing is, it seems most controllers can be custom set.  Meaning that you don't have to use a 360 controller, any USB joystick working with windows will work with it.

[SQrL]

I ended up just installing Vista 32bit (x86) and PPJoy works great (dont notice a lag at all).
Figuring out which PPJoy key mappings to SFIV's "xbox joy" reference layout was a tag tricky, but after that all is well.

Thanks for all the replies (

[phantompower]

Is anyone having any issues with PPjoy and the IPAC?  I am using PPjoy to map the buttons but I can't seem to come up with a solution where my IPAC configuration happens to use any of the XBox buttons A,B,C,X,Y.Z. 

Say for example I program the medium kick button (button 5) to be B, the menu system in the game will register it as me hitting B on a keyboard and back out one menu.  It thinks I am hitting B on an Xbox controller.

I had to remap my IPAC but I was wondering if this issue was just me or what...

[u_rebelscum]

Well, almost zero windows apps can tell the difference between inputs from different keyboards; mame is one of the few.  On two conditions: you enable -multikeyboard and PPJoy is seen by RawInput as a different keyboard.

Assuming the latter, after enabling -multikeyboard, you'll need to remap mame so it knows when to look for keyboard 2 B or the keyboard 1 B.  Which can be a pain if the wrong keyboard is #2, since defaults are to #1 only.  Without the -multikeyboard enabled, mame looks for any B key, just like 99.99% of the apps out there, IOW by default mame treats a PPJoy B & an ipac B the same.

So...  three choices:
remap ipac so it doesn't share keys with ppjoy,
remap ppjoy so it doesn't shear keys with ipac, or
in mame enable -multikeyboard and remap mame.