I-pac 2 setup info

[flylear45]

I see not a lot has been answered on these forums with questions on the ipac 2. Here's where I am right now trying to fine-tune my horizontal cabinet built with 2 joysticks/6 buttons per player, trackball, and 4 select/start buttons.

I was having issues getting everything set up with the default keyboard emulation provided in the stock firmware. I was not able to have the controller be seen as a JOYPAD  by windows........ none of the keypresses registered in the Windows joystick setup screen. That made setting a hotkey problematic in BigBox without running a script, and made Retroarch setup a pain in many cases.

IF your Ipac 2 is 2015 or later, there is a firmware update available to bring it to version 314. It allows the inputs to be seen as JOYPAD inputs OR keypresses in the programming software. 

I set mine up with my P1 joystick and 5 buttons to be read as JOYPAD in the software and now Windows sees it as a POV hat and 5 buttons. (I use 1 button on each player as mouse buttons along with my trackball as a mouse.) This configuration now gets passed along to Windows programs like LaunchBox.

Not perfect but good enough to be able to have LaunchBox  use it to set a hotkey. Programming buttons in Retroarch is much more user friendly as well. I just needed to re-map my controls one time in Mame General Settings, and for each game with unique settings where the old KEYBOARD inputs are now JOYPAD inputs.

There may be a better way to set it up that I haven't come across, but this is what I am going to roll with.

I'm going to look into getting the joysticks to register as joystick instead of POV hat......... I'll update if I get that sorted.

 

Cheers, Jim

[Fablog]

If you need to emulate a x360 joypad you could use UCR.