This has great uses beyond just gaming, really: it makes it easy to configure an old gamepad you have as a floating mouse for home theater PCs, for example. With ten minutes of fiddling and playing through the tutorial a few times, I had a setup that handled most situations easily on the gamepad. Something more complex like “Deus Ex” is going to still require a keyboard, at least for more exotic functions, but the nice thing about XPadder is you can lay out functions any way you want: it’s just key bindings, so control schemes are up to you. You can even download a diagram of your controller and use that as a visual guide, if you want. Helping the process is the program being quite responsive as you set bindings and use those buttons or mouse movements within the program, the key lights up. It’s incredibly easy, and works right away. But setting up a dual-stick controller for, say, “Portal” is a snap: just get your buttons entered, build a layout, and bind the keys to the points you want. ![]() It’s a bit more involved than just setting bindings: you will have to go through a pretty painless setup process for each controller, and you will need to tag each button with each binding individually. XPadder is pretty straightforward: it simply binds your keys to keyboard and mouse bindings. Why doesn’t this come standard with Steam? Why doesn’t this come standard with Windows? This is software at its best: it sees a problem and just stone cold solves it. This was after two hours fiddling with two different games and getting, at best, outrageously broken results. Within fifteen minutes of downloading this program, I was fully up and running. And it was easily the best $10 I’ve ever spent. Then, while reading about editing these config files, somebody offhandedly mentions XPadder. I’m not doing this to shoot people in the face. I run an Ubuntu laptop, I spend enough time screwing up code as it is. ![]() So I get the tower set up a few weeks ago, I download Steam, I install a few games I’ve had before like “Deus Ex” and “Portal” and then discover that using a gamepad with these games is impossible without editing config files. I’ve used both I’m gaming on the couch since the only way I can justify buying a massive tower when I already own a laptop, a tablet AND an editing desktop is to set it up as a home theater PC a gamepad is an ideal solution for my particular situation. Yes, I know, I know, “It Is the One True Control Scheme”, blah blah blah, whatever, argue about it all you want in the comments. But that left me with a dilemma, because I also dislike keyboard/mouse. Other great apps like Joy2Key are Xpadder, JoyToKey, reWASD and Gaming. The best alternative is AntiMicro, which is both free and Open Source. There are more than 10 alternatives to Joy2Key for Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and Objective-C. After years out of it, I got back into PC gaming recently because I’m Creative Director around here and playing PC games is going to be, one way or the other, part of my job. Joy2Key is described as 'Translate joystick movements into keyboard events (X and console)' and is an app. Free program with which you can also emulate the keyboard and mouse as if it were the gamepad and although its owner is no longer in charge, many fans of this program have decided to continue using it and you can download it for free.
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