MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Re: Sending Keys to MAME

Hi -- sorry to walk right in and necro an old thread, but I've been working on a similar project and HowardC's post jumped out at me:

> There is your problem... you are trying to send keyboard input. Try joystick input,
> it's much simplier.

That sounds like a great idea but I'm at a bit of a loss on where to start.

Bit of background: I'm trying to get a decent Wii Remote gaming setup under Windows. Both OSX and Linux have pretty good keyboard emulation libraries for the remote, but the best thing Windows seems to have is GlovePIE, which, while an interesting and admirable piece of software, seems a bit hacky and has some rather bizarre license terms.

There are a few good libraries out for the Wii Remote; I'm currently working with the C#-based WiimoteLib but I'm not married to it. I've rigged it up to simulate keyboard presses using SendInput(), but as the OP notes that doesn't work for DirectInput.

Now, I stumbled across this thread looking for a solution to simulate keypresses using DirectInput, but HowardC makes an excellent point: joystick input would be much better for my purposes (since I'm using a game controller, after all).

So how WOULD I go about sending joystick data to MAME or similar programs? Do I need something like VJoy or PPJoy, as mentioned in headkaze's post? The Wii Remote DOES show up under Game Controllers in the Control Panel but shows no buttons or joysticks when you pull up its properties.

(I could, of course, use my current SendInput() keyboard emulation code WITH VJoy to get joystick output, but that seems needlessly convoluted -- using a game controller to emulate a keyboard emulating a game controller.)

Anyway, any ideas appreciated; thanks for reading this far.