Limited number of controller buttons recognized in BB/LB

[ffingers]

So I have a weird issue and am curious if I'm the only one having it or if it's a known limitation or I'm doing something wrong. Haha. Here's the situation:

- I am running a GP-wiz controller board for my 'cade - it has somewhere around 40-ish inputs
- I use vJoy to simulate a "second" gamepad so that I can use the "one" controller as two controllers in Steam

This all works absolutely fine. The configuration in MAME and RetroArch also work completely fine.

The issue shows up that in setting the big box and launchbox mappings...it will not recognize any buttons past 16 for my GP-Wiz. I have opened the controller properties in Windows and sure enough, I press the button and it show's it's being pressed. It just might be button say 29. I was able to track down that it Big Box will recognize all the buttons UP to #16, after that, it does acknowledge them being pressed.

My question is this, is that an internal constraint within Big Box because all the emulators are able to see all the buttons, it's only BB/LB that won't see all the buttons. Is it a configuration issue where I need to tell BB/LB it has more buttons? I'm completely stumped. I can work around this but requires me to do some wonky things for my navigation,

 

Any thoughts anyone on what I can do or if they have seen this before?

Thanks

Tony

[DelugeIA]

Tony,

I don't have a fix, but I also have a GP-Wiz 40 and can confirm what you're seeing.

From what I can tell, for the purposes of "Options > Controller Mappings", BigBox (v10.15) only seems to recognize Joy 1 (Right, Left, Up, Down) and Buttons 1-16.

I don't see any reason why BigBox wouldn't recognize buttons 17-32, but it doesn't.

Attached is the reference sheet I made for my own setup.

-- Jeff Sorensen

Pinout BigBox Mame.pdf

[neil9000]

7 hours ago, DelugeIA said:

From what I can tell, for the purposes of "Options > Controller Mappings", BigBox (v10.15) only seems to recognize Joy 1 (Right, Left, Up, Down) and Buttons 1-16.

I don't see any reason why BigBox wouldn't recognize buttons 17-32, but it doesn't.

Because name me a controller that has 32 buttons on it. A typical controller will have two analog sticks, a dpad, and 12 other buttons, those being four face, four shoulder/triggers, start and select as well as analog stick presses. So if you add the dpad as buttons that equals 16 buttons and two analog sticks.

[DelugeIA]

3 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Because name me a controller that has 32 buttons on it.

There are lots of controllers that have more than 16 buttons... GP-Wiz 40, I-PAC Ultimate, Stream Deck, X-Arcade, etc.

In BigBox, there are 45 different controller mapping options, e.g. "Show Ratings".

For those of us who want to use BigBox with a stand-up arcade machine, we don't want to use the player buttons to control the system interface, so we set up a separate control panel for navigating games, viewing high scores, etc.

I really like BigBox, I'm just not sure why this seemingly arbitrary limitation was set.

-- Jeff Sorensen

[Retro808]

25 minutes ago, DelugeIA said:

There are lots of controllers that have more than 16 buttons... GP-Wiz 40, I-PAC Ultimate, Stream Deck, X-Arcade, etc.

In BigBox, there are 45 different controller mapping options, e.g. "Show Ratings".

For those of us who want to use BigBox with a stand-up arcade machine, we don't want to use the player buttons to control the system interface, so we set up a separate control panel for navigating games, viewing high scores, etc.

I really like BigBox, I'm just not sure why this seemingly arbitrary limitation was set.

-- Jeff Sorensen

Neil is talking about gamepad controllers like DS4, Xbox One or 8bitdo (which is what the controller options in BigBox are for). BigBox does see two controllers, but it does not differentiate between Joy1 and Joy2. Those devices you named such as X-arcade and I-Pac replicate keyboards so yes they have more buttons, but it is seen as a keystrokes. Ipac and Xarcade have trimode options, but once you flip either one to, say Xinput, it now acts as I mentioned true gamepads do.

[DelugeIA]

If Windows recognizes "Joy 1 Button 17" from a GP-Wiz 40, as does MAME, as does AutoHotKey, etc... why doesn't BigBox? 

As I understand it, these extra buttons are designed specifically for such use.

[Retro808]

11 minutes ago, DelugeIA said:

If Windows recognizes "Joy 1 Button 17" from a GP-Wiz 40, as does MAME, as does AutoHotKey, etc... why doesn't BigBox? 

As I understand it, these extra buttons are designed specifically for such use.

I cannot tell you why BB was coded that way. I can only confirm what it does and clarify what was being said. There has not been a huge outpouring of users requesting otherwise. So Jason has not looked into changing how BigBox sees true gamepad inputs.

[neil9000]

Yes i was referring to controllers in my reply as you stated yours were just that. Usually a setup like that with a ton of buttons is a keyboard encoder not a controller encoder, so is configured in the keyboard mappings section, not controller mappings.

EDIT:

Also yours is two controllers, so they do in fact have 16 buttons each, just like i said, really the encoder should be setup as two 16 button controllers, not one with 32 buttons.

[DelugeIA]

1 hour ago, neil9000 said:

Also yours is two controllers, so they do in fact have 16 buttons each, just like i said, really the encoder should be setup as two 16 button controllers, not one with 32 buttons.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I can tell, BigBox recognizes the GP-Wiz 40 as a single device.

[neil9000]

48 minutes ago, DelugeIA said:

I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I can tell, BigBox recognizes the GP-Wiz 40 as a single device.

Thats what i mean, i will admit i have no experience with these decoders for these control panels, but as far as i am concerned they should have 2 ID's, a 16 button controller ID for player one, and another 16 button controller ID for player 2. That would then mean each player has the normal 16 buttons.

[DelugeIA]

Yeah, I am not a hardware expert either, just a user. I just know that the GP-Wiz 40 is pretty popular and, to the best of my knowledge, there is no way for a user to configure the one device to appear as two separate devices.

Again, the intention (mine anyways, I can't speak for the original poster), is to use the extra buttons not for game play, but for controlling the BigBox UI (Options > Controller Mappings) for things like "Show Game Details Screen" and "Set Star Rating".

Attached is what the Windows' Game Controllers' properties show, for example while pressing "Button 24".

Thank you both for your insight. For now I'm going to relegate this to a "known limitation" in BigBox that will hopefully change in the future.

– Jeff Sorensen