Driver Gamepad Windows 11
Lane Frisch
I'm looking to create a driver for a game controller I have (a cobalt flux www.cobaltflux.com ). The physical controller itself has nine face buttons and two control-box buttons (start/select). The control box has a usb port, but as far as I can tell no one has ever written drivers for it before. The end result I want is to be able to plug in the cobalt flux via the usb port and have windows recognize it as a game controller.
I have some programming experience. I'm a senior undergraduate student in computer science at UC Davis and an intern at a large embedded systems company, however this project involves several aspects I have no experience in: interfacing hardware and software via a USB port, investigating feedback from hardware I didn't build (which bits light up when I press a button?), and creating drivers and indeed programs in general for windows.
It may be worthwhile to note that I need to have joyPAD support and not joySTICK support for the buttons since play will involve pressing down any number of buttons at once and joysticks generally only register one direction of input at any given time.
When you plug in the pad via USB it announces with a device ID and a vendor ID which device it is. Windows Plug-and-Play starts searching for a driver. This mechanism spots it is a pointing device (in my case one or 2 mice) and makes sure that it is treated as a raw data input device. Input from these devices is converted to messages handled by the OS. The solution seems to be to pass the messages of such a raw input device to the right handler. In my case the two mice are both recognised as mice and the messages are used by the same handler as the ones coming from the 3rd mouse that is really my pointing device. I am not experienced enough in C++ coding in order to dig into the rawinput API. I just received an interesting link as answer on my question: at least this gives an answer on my problem. May be it will give you ideas for writing your driver! Good luck !!! Stefan
For DS4/DS5 to properly function on your Windows 10/11 PC you are required to install necessary first and third party drivers. Some of which, of course, are optional but will improve DS4windows capabilities. Here we will list and give a description of every driver needed to allow your DualShock 4 and DualSense 5 to work. Launching the DS4 app will also ask to install the drivers.
DS4Windows uses the FakerInput driver to expose system-wide virtual keyboard, relative mouse and absolute mouse. Allows Keyboard + Mouses events/commands to be usable in some situations where the usual way DS4Windows sends those commands (via SendInput) fails. Examples of those situations are elevated processes and games, UAC prompts and anti-cheat systems that block SentInput events. Use of FakerInput is necessary to allow DS4Windows to work with some games with anti-cheat protection like valorant.
HidGuardian is a driver that can hide controllers from the system and allow only chosen processes to detect them. It was previously used by DS4Windows to solve the double input issue, but was made obsolete by the release of its successor, HidHide, a similar driver that works better and is easier to use.
DS4Windows removed support for HidGuardian in version 3.0.8 in favor of HidHide. As such, users who used and still have HidGuardian installed can be in a state where their controllers are hidden and undetectable to Windows and DS4Windows.
i am currently looking for a gamepad/controller solution for my Win98/MSdos rig. Been looking at logitech controllers and mayflash ps2/ps1 adapters. i was wondering if its possible to get these usb controllers/adapter working in MSDOS?
I've got an adapter (based on arduino) called joy2ps2, that let's you connect 2 atari style joystick/gamepads to the ps/2 port of the computer. Usually they are 2 buttons joysticks (like the Competition Pro), but it also supports 6 button Sega Genesis gamepads.
No additional drivers are needed IIRC, Windows 98 detects it as a Logitech Dual Action as long as the switch on the bottom of the controller is set to DirectInput mode, and it being a USB gamepad I doubt it works on real mode DOS as previously pointed out (you'll still need a separate DB15 gamepad for that ? ).
I feel you on the chucking old hardware. Probably 5 or so years ago I had 3-4 different AWE32 cards I gave away as well as some Socket 7 motherboards, a bunch of old processors, etc. a couple years ago I gave away a bunch of old video cards that I didn't want as well as a complete PII system.
This smaller update is intended to combat the Control Center issue some users have. For some users it silently crashes when it tries to open the Main Window. Which after doing the driver package install is the default Window to be launched. Unfortunately, on all my machines and systems the Control Center is working as expected. Right now, I have only some little guessing, where the issue may come from, but do not have any clue about the why and how to fix it.
Recently some users were asking about compatibility and related issues. However it took some time until one was finally dropping a name and i figured all issue were about the same game. Just to make things quick in the future, if you have any game/tool/program that HID Wiimote does not work with, state its name along with the issue in detail. That way i can specifically look into it. If the particular piece of software is either still in active development or open source, there is a good chance i am able to fix it.
But that is changing now. I am going to release the multi driver mode feature in multiple steps as i progress development. The benefit is that new features are available earlier. On the downside development time may increase, as i need to reimplement and refactor the codebase. Furthermore settings are not guaranteed to be stable among releases. But slow progress is better than no progress at all.
The current release only includes the gamepad mode. The following updates are going to resolve around adding further driver modes. The goal is to finally have one driver supporting all kinds of different mode, i.e. IR mouse, DPad mouse, etc.
As said the current release only includes the gamepad mode. So no update for people that use the Wiimote as mouse. Also to simplify the development process a Control Center is only compatible with its accompanied device driver version.
Rather small technical changes for HID Wiimote. First one is primary a fix for Unity3D, when you want to use the Wiimote as gamepad. Unity3D uses RawInput instead if DirectInput, when reading from generic non XInput Gamepads. It seems RawInput has some issues with axes that have a negative value range, e.g. -127 to 127. So the change is to simply use a value range from 0 to 255.
Using the proper API Calls the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack is not needed anymore on Windows 8 and above. Both Wiimotes types (TR & non-TR) and the Wii U Pro are working fine. Here is the code repository of my test program.
As the MSDN Desgin Guide Sending HID Reports by Kernel-Mode Drivers (WriteFile will send out an IRP_MJ_WRITE request to the driver interface) suggests, the output report buffers shall have the size of the largest output report supported by the device. In case of the Wiimote this is 22 Byte.
This seems to be currently enforced by the Microsoft HID Class Driver on Windows 7 and the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack, as they will fail WriteFile attempts with the error ERROR_INVALID_USER_BUFFER, when the buffer size is less.
On Windows 7 however more bytes than the acutal report are sent to the device, which produces an error on the Wiimote. It is unknown whether this is a bug or intented behaviour. The Toshiba Bluetooth Stack in contrast only sends the appropiate amount of bytes according to the used report to the device.
Rather small update with just one and a half fix. Regarding the connectivity issue on Windows 10 Version 1511, i had no issues while testing. Therefore i assume either the updated WDK or another Windows update fixed it. If the problem persists, please report back, so i can take another look at it.
This build has nothing new except that is has been rebuild with the newest Visual Studio 2015 and Windows Driver Kit 10. So for non Windows 10 users there is no urgent need to download/update it. But you can if you like to, just make sure to uninstall the previous/old driver.
So this is a multi-system Desktop build and not an Universal Driver. I am going to provide an Universal Driver as well soon, but there is some work to be done. The driver compiles fine and without any error. The only issue is that i have to make an universal .inf file, which simply requires me to read through the MSDN documentation. However, i am currently not able to test the Universal Driver on a Windows Phone nor on an IoT-System, so the build is going to be purely experimental and for people that just want to give it a try.
I am also not quite certain about the driver signing regarding the Universal Driver. I have no clue whether it is possible to deactivate the driver verification on Mobile and IoT-Systems and get an unsigned driver loaded. I would assume there is some way, because devs need the ability to test drivers on the device, but that might require additional test modes, which in turn may have side effects.
Back at my home university in Berlin, as well as here in Oslo and i assume also at other universities, students learn mainly Java. They may have a single C course about the language, but that is all. Not a big problem, because all other courses are featuring Java as language as well. Until at the end of their studies, sometimes in the master degree studies, they encounter a course that is focused on high performance highly optimized C code, with a lecturer that expects everyone to be well familiar with C.
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