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Author Topic: More buttons and combinations for Xbox controller users!  (Read 4801 times)

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Offline Zaae

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More buttons and combinations for Xbox controller users!
« on: July 08, 2010, 10:09:21 PM »
I posted earlier in another thread about a problem I had been having with my keygrabber driven controller. You can read it here if you're interested in the rest of the story:
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,15312.0.html

For lack of any other options, I took Budman's advice, and I went out and found a used Xbox controller. Problem was, I used more button combos than the Xbox plugin allows. Turns out, disabling the axis controls in keygrabber, and redefining the keys for the Xbox controller allows me axis motion that's controlled by the Xbox plugin, but all the key combos that keygrabber allowed.

I'm pretty excited about it, I don't know if anyone has tried it, but it works so slick, I wanted to share.

You can set yours up any way you like, but I'm using something like this:
Shoulder buttons can be CTRL / ALT, each button (X-Y-A-B) can be bound to F5 F6 F7 F8
Using this, you get:
Your normal set of 4 buttons
Control + those 4 buttons
Alt + those 4 buttons
Control + alt + those 4 buttons
etc.

There are a lot of combinations that you could come up with using this strategy. I know this idea isn't new for users of keygrabber, but I thought the Xbox controllers would love some extra button functions.

For an added level of cool, I put in sounds in many of my scripts using an online text to speech reader, and audacity (free) audio studio. It's great to have some feedback from your machine. You can use the function PlayWave ("SOUNDS\AUTOZZERO.WAV") to play your sounds. Change the folder to where ever you decide to save them.

I hope this opens up some new options to others.

Z
« Last Edit: July 08, 2010, 10:12:03 PM by Zaaephod »
Re: More buttons and combinations for Xbox controller users!
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2011, 05:31:59 PM »
I've been playing with this and its a great idea but I've found one catch.

If the controller goes into sleep mode then keygrabber stops seeing the buttons and reinitialising comms (big silver Xbox botton) does not fix this. The Xbox plugin does work however but only the keys assigned to it will work not the extras setup in Keygrabber.

Ideally the Xbox plugin would incorporate some of the added functionality that the key grabber does. The ablity to assign Shift and Alt modifiers to all the keys is a really nice feature as well as recognising the thumb pad on the lower left as it can be usefull for page navigation etc.

Lee has written an awesome plugin, adding the ability to map keys will make a wireless Xbox controller the pendant of choice IMHO. Whack a charging dock somehere on you machine and you have a nice place to store the conroller and no dead battery issues.

Maybe something we could see in future releases?