How to use gamepads and joysticks with the fe?

[)p(]

THE FE NOW HAS JOYSTICK SUPPORT.

...
The frontend supports only key and mouse input. So how to use it with joysticks and gamepads?

For now until I get a Director extension to enable joysticks directly you can use a key mapper that maps joystick input to keyboard keys.

A lot of joysticks like my thrustmaster gamepad ship with an utility that can do this for you. if there is no such thing for your joystick or it does not work ok. Try this one:

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016823 ... glish.html

It has lots of options, like running silently and the use tresholds for analog inputs...

(
Optionally if you have problems in mame with joytokey then you can also unload it and reload it with the runbefore and runafter options in the fe.

download this:
http://www.i-modernist.com/joytokeyutil.zip

then put your joytokey files in:
c:\yourfepath\joytokey\
so that c:\yourfepath\joytokey\joytokey.exe is present there...i wrote it so it closes joytokey even if it resides in the traybar.

then add killjoytokey.exe from the zip to the c:\yourfepath\joytokey\
then add loadjoytokeythenfe.exe from the zip to c:\yourfepath\

then in your cfg\emulators\femame.cfg
runbefore|c:\yourfepath\joytokey\killjoytokey.exe|
runafter|c:\yourfepath\joytokey\joytokey.exe/hidden|

and be sure to select the don't show window on startup option in joytokey to run it silently so you don't see the joytokey window popup when it gets reloaded

run the fe with:
loadjoytokeythenfe.exe
this wil load joytojey invisible and then load the fe
)

peter

[)p(]

ok there is now a free director joystick extension...so i guess i could add joystick support if it is really needed. The above solution works good for me on my desktop pc and I never heard about any problems with it...
So if the above does not work let me know...as if noone has problems it'll be very low priority to hook it up...

peter