How to emulate Xbox controllers for Steam on an arcade cabinet

[Johnny Wu-Tang]

I'm building my first arcade-style cabinet and am aiming to play Steam games using arcade controls. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a solution where I can control games easily in Steam.

My thought is to remap my controllers to 4 xbox controller emulators. Ideally I want something where I don't have to remap buttons for each game, but will instead always treat it like an Xbox controller. So the solution doesn't have to be my direction below. If you have a diff solution that gets the same results, I'm all for it!

I have been messing with x360ce, UCR, etc, but my main problem is that they ONLY see the keyboard OR the joystick. I need to combine them both for each joystick.

In Steam Big Picture mode I have tried to go to Controller Settings where I can see the Ultrastiks, but again, I can't add button presses. They will only recognize stick movement. Likewise I can see some of the test controllers I make, but they are either ONLY the joystick or ONLY the key presses. in x360ce I can only use the keyboard once, and not at the same time as a joystick even though I can add both profiles to one controller.

my setup: x4 Ultramarc Ultrastiks with 2 IPAC Ultimate boards driving them - Win 10 PC. The IPAC's remap the buttons to keyboard presses, all of them map to 1 keyboard.

Any help or direction will be greatly appreciated!

[shoopy]

You can do what is called a pad hack. Basically you take a 360 controller board and wire your controls up to where they go on the board, then plug the board in like a usual controller.

[End0fDayz]

You'd need 1 IPAC per control setup (which you have already) and set it up as xinput and not the keyboard key presses. Those IPACs can easily switch between the 2 modes. I have the same ones and I switch between keypresses for a RetroPie setup and xinput for CoinOps setup.

[_I_]

if you dont want to kill a controller, use an arduino

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61U-S7_XTDw

[SeriousCCIE]

Yeah I ended up buying dedicated joysticks and wiring them into the IPAC. I did the same for coin slots too, so 1-up and 2-up coin insertions on the door mechanism actually did something different, so say Gauntlet recognized that player 2 added credit.

It requires effort, and takes time... but dedicated joystick hardware like that also will last a long time. They have less that can go wrong with them to break, also.

It is sort of cool to repurpose controller gamepads like that, but I do not believe they are known for their enduring lifecycles as compared to more dedicated, if simpler, joystick control hardware that is more designed for this purpose.

[Johnny Wu-Tang]

Thanks everyone for your input! I think EndOfDayz is closest to what I'm looking for...

Originally posted by End0fDayz:

You'd need 1 IPAC per control setup (which you have already) and set it up as xinput and not the keyboard key presses. Those IPACs can easily switch between the 2 modes. I have the same ones and I switch between keypresses for a RetroPie setup and xinput for CoinOps setup.

Yes, my situation sounds simliar -- I want to switch between MAME CoinOPS and Steam.
So this sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I follow. Is this what you're talking about?
Ultimarc Website IPAC Ult [www.ultimarc.com] (under multi-mode tab)
I'm going to take a stab at this. Is there anything else I should be aware of?