Search the Community

one problem I run into all the time with emulators and pc games is if the controller isn't turned on \ plugged in before I start said application then it doesn't see it at all after I do turn on the controller. This was the main reason I went to retroarch for emulation and also why I also started using retroarch for mame. There are still other emulators and plenty of pc games I play. But having to quit then restart or if a second player wants to join just to get the controllers recognized. Sometimes the controller settings get wiped and I have to set it up all over again. Is there a program like x360ce but for dinput so I can setup a "virtual" controller then emulator/game thinks is always plugged in? Like x360ce setup multiple controllers player1, player2, etc. So I can just start these applications then pick up my wireless Xbox 360 controller turn it on and start playing?

I figured there may be some MAME experts on this board who would know about this stuff. I've been working on trying to figure out how to get inputs from AntiMicro and AutoHotKey going into MAME successfully, which has been a crazy rabbit hole of silliness. So, at this point I am working with MAME 178 and have already gone through the process of updating my ROM collection for 178. I was able to locate a NoNag patch for 178, but all the references I can find to the "Force DirectInput" patch are old and the source files where those changes are supposedly made no longer exist in the MAME souce code. Also in my research I've found that MAME has the options (both command line and ini) to set the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, lightgunprovider, and joystickerprovider options to whatever you want, including dinput for DirectInput. It kinda seems like the whole "force dinput via source code patch" thing has been made obsolete by these new features. Can any MAME-heads on here confirm this is the case? I'm still tempted to compile my own MAME since I can (theoretically) make one optimized for multi-core CPUs, My machines all have at least 4 CPU cores so I'd imagine I'll get a mild performance boost out of that. Along the same "long running patches which are now obsolete" lines, I also found that MKChamp has announced he's no longer making hiscore patches after version 178 and has switched over to using a Lua plugin based solution instead. Has anybody tried this out? I'd imagine because this is an official plug-in it's the cleaner solution to use long term, but I haven't messed with it yet.