Separate Device for Input and Buttons?

General
#1

I’m hoping I haven’t asked this before… I have an arcade controller that sends button presses as x-input buttons (X-Arcade tank stick), but has an Ultrastik U360 as the joystick. I need to know how set the input in RA so that those two different devices act as the joystick and button input. I have been trying for quite a long time to figure out how to do this. Thanks for any help you can offer.

#2

There’s no specific way to gang multiple gamepad devices into a single device in RetroArch on a global basis. On a per-core basis, you could go into quick menu > controls and set the mapped port for both devices to 1.

On a global basis, I think you’d need to use something like joy2key or antimicro to make them both show up as keyboard events, which will all just dump into the same keyboard device (i.e., p1 device index ‘disabled’).

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#3

Thanks for the reply, Hunter. I should have mentioned that I have REWASD, and that things like that or joy2key won’t work for this because the U360 joystick is automatically re-mappable with each game you open in MAME so that it is the correct 8-way, 4-way, diagonal, etc… and that you would lose all that by running it through joy2key, defeating the purpose of the joysticks. It’s a fairly common upgrade to put a U360 in an arcade controller, so I’m thinking there are probably other people that have run into this problem.

As far as mapping both devices to port 1 within the core, I’ll have to look at the MAME current core tonight (this is mainly for MAME) and see if I can do something that way.

Thanks again for your advice.

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#4

I’m not very familiar with that stick, but I have seen that you can use a connector that goes to the stick itself and on the other end it connects to the buttons so that it will show up as a single controller. maybe that’s the easier route for using it with retroarch?

#5

Thanks, Hari… the joystick and the rest of the controller have separate PCB’s… the joystick has an internal one that controls it and the rest of it has a PCB in the enclosure, so I’m not really sure how that would work. If you have more information on it, I’ll take a look at it.

#6

As I said I’m not familiar with this stick, but based on what I found:

look at the very first minute of this Video

And if this is your stick under “Use of the 10-pin I/O port (Optional)” it says:

“Additional wires can be inserted into the free locations to connect another 6 buttons.”

So I guess you can connect the other end of the harness to the buttons and connect the stick through its usb.

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#7

Hmm… I’m looking at this harness now and, potentially, this could help me, but when I see a bundle of loose wires and wiring diagrams, it is probably past my humble pay grade.

#8

Ok, so I sat down with this, and had to tinker a bit but it worked. I actually didn’t realize the ports worked this way, so thanks for the help, Hunter. I’m very happy to have this set up finally.

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