Stella (Atari 2600) Per Game Controller Settings

[Koop]

This is more of a question specific to Stella v3.6.1, but I thought someone might have some good advice. I'm trying to play some Atari 2600 games that require the "keyboard" or "kid's controller". By default Stella has many of these controller input commands mapped to keyboard buttons, but the problem is two-fold:

• The default buttons mapped by Stella are randomly strewn across my arcade buttons (my setup caters to MAME buttons).
• I can't simply map the controller keyboard buttons (picture a telephone dial pad: 1-9,*,0,#) to my current controller setup because each game uses the controller differently. For example, in Big Bird's Egg Catch it uses 5 and 6 to move left and right. Another game Alpha Beam With Ernie uses 4 and 6 for left and right.

Photos of original controller: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=atari+2600+kid%27s+controller&t=ffnt&iax=1&ia=images

I first looked at Xpadder to solve the per game issue, but as far as I can tell Xpadder is only useful for gamepads, not keyboards. I don't think Stella itself supports per game controller configurations (or am I missing this?). Any thoughts?

[stigzler]

Watch this space - should be releasing a plugin soon with per-game keyboard remaps possible. No promises though, cos the whole sendkeys business seems quite convoluted, but might work for Stella.

[stigzler]

Do me a favour - send me the launch command line for Stella, the emu download link and some example games for which you need remapping (just the names). This'll speed up my looking at it when get a minute.

EDIT: Oh - forgive me - you did mention a couple of games...

[stigzler]

OUCH. OK - so this isn't looking good. Stella doesn't seem to respond to the usual sendkey/sendinput from .net. Struggling to find an alternative, short of one of the coding geniuses on here who know more about windows keyboard messages than me either giving me a steer or making another suggestion.

In the mean time, you could look at Auto Hot Key (AHK). Doesn't take too long to learn and you could make individual scripts for individual games. Launching these on a game-specific basis will be possible with the app I'm slapping together.