Controls being automatically remapped for Joystick control.. possible?

edited April 2012 in Emulators
Is there a Speccy emulator out there that automatically converts the basic controls UP,DOWN,LEFT,RIGHT,FIRE, ALT FIRE to the actions of a plugged in Joystick without having to remap every action for every game individually? (kind of like game-wide override)

I plan to set up a PC with lots of Emulators and the Spectrum being my favourite I'd really like it if I could just pop a game in and go using my Joystick/Joypad without any fuss.

Has this been implemented on an existing emu or could it be applied fairly easily? :)
Post edited by nevsan on

Comments

  • edited April 2012
    The only one I've seen is the GBA Speccy emulator, where you pre-configure the controls for each game you want to pull in when compiling a cartridge image.

    I wonder if any of the other emulators let you specify control options or a custom configuration from the command line?
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
  • edited April 2012
    I'm not sure I understand the question.

    However, some emulators allow you to map cursor keys, Sinclair or the Kempston controls to the plugged in joystick, automatically which takes care of the majority of the software that supported at least 1 of the three. I usually leave it to Kempston emulation by default as there are very few games that don't support this.

    Alternately, you can map the Joystick controls to user defined keys (I think Spectaculator and ZX Spin both support this), but then that's not the same thing. The problem is that different games have different controls for UP, DOWN (and indeed different ideas of what constitute UP, DOWN etc) etc and this is not something that can easily be automatically mapped to a joystick.
  • edited April 2012
    I think the problem is that the key to select Kempston Joystick and/or start the game differs from game to game, so you'd still have to map the SELECT/START buttons on a game pad (or a MAME cab) individually on a per-game basis, even if the directions and FIRE were set to Kempston.

    With the GBA, I had to map all sorts of other keys to buttons to get around games that asked you to do things like type in your name for high scores. Still, there were some games where there just weren't enough buttons. Things like Fairlight and Cybernoid, where you need some number keys to select item slots, are particularly fiddly.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
  • edited April 2012
    You can simply select the controls in every game, save a snapshot, then use the snapshots in the cab.
  • edited April 2012
    Still doesn't sort out the START button. And multi-load games won't work from snapshots.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
  • edited April 2012
    You can have both a tap file and snapshot made from the tap. Maybe not in all emulators support it, but I used multiload games with snapshots this way without problems.
  • edited April 2012
    joefish wrote: »
    The only one I've seen is the GBA Speccy emulator, where you pre-configure the controls for each game you want to pull in when compiling a cartridge image.

    I wonder if any of the other emulators let you specify control options or a custom configuration from the command line?

    FUSEPSP (for the, er, PSP) let's you assign controls on a per game basis, and then save the control configuration, so when in future you load the game the PSP controls are configured correctly.
  • edited April 2012
    If it's for use on the PC and not a console you could always run the emu in conjunction with Joy2Key?

    Joy2key let's you assign any keys to any button of your pad/stick, it also lets you save your configurations so you can have specific configs for specific games. OK this doesn't exactly answer the original question.

    But you could try setting your pad/stick to Kempston.....and pick Kempston (Or other compatible stick) instead of keyboard ;)
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited April 2012
    If it's for use on the PC and not a console you could always run the emu in conjunction with Joy2Key?

    Joy2key let's you assign any keys to any button of your pad/stick, it also lets you save your configurations so you can have specific configs for specific games.

    Ah, good one. You could then have something that spits out command lines to launch them both with the appropriate files.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
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