Joystick Mapper for Pc

Works great with my Xbox 360 USB controller. The homepage for this app is really good; there are lots of good tips there, like how to map a key combination (like Ctrl-R or whatever) to one controller button. The only thing that’s a little funky are the trigger buttons, LT and RT. These are usually used as throttles in games, since they can output a range of “pull” depending on how hard you’re pulling on the trigger. Every once in a while these seem to get a little “stuck” in the game I’m playing with this app. But I figure that’s a limitation of the Mac or the controller driver. Yes, you do need a controller driver if you’re using an Xbox controller. This app’s homepage talks about that too. The driver is free and it’s on Github, the open-source code-sharing site. I’ve been using this controller for ages with the open-source driver, to use it with Steam games and such. But I needed this app to use the controller with an old game that didn’t support controllers. Two things that would be nice: 1 - if controller buttons and triggers could be labeled the same way as they are on the controller, so that it’s easy to see what’s what. And 2 - being able to manually sort your keybinds. As it is, they can’t be sorted—they just stay in the order you add them. There is an alphabetical sort option but that’s not useful and doesn’t seem to work.

This app is not as intuitive as you would intially expect it to be—you can’t just plug in a controller and make it work right away as some people might expect (probably why so many don’t like the app). Regardless, after a quick online tutorial I got my PowerA USB controller to work perfectly for my game. Just an fyi: YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE CUSTOM SETTINGS FOR EACH GAME. (it gets easier after the first time). I think a lot of the issues people are having can be resolved by understanding how the settings of the app work: for example, I kept having my cursor move off the screen and bring up my dock, but I figured out there is a "lock cursor to main screen" function and now I don’t have that issue. I ESPECIALLY like the scan function, it makes it really easy to attach keys to the different parts of my controller. Without the scan function, I don’t think this would be a very good app, because it makes everything so much easier to set up.

I used this application to map 56 different inputs in total, across 4 controllers. They are DualShock 4 controllers, all connected via Bluetooth. The reason I had to do an exhaustive mapping like this is that the game Samurai Gunn does not natively recognize the DualShock 4, so I remapped them to keyboard keys. The profiles I setup for this purpose work beautifully, and no one would know that the game does not have native controller support. I can reliably connect anywhere from one to all four controllers and I know exactly which the app profiles will be utilized. There is no signal propagation delay introduced by this app that I can detect, and this is very important in Samurai Gunn, as one or two milliseconds in either direction can affect whether you live or die. And best of all if I want to switch back to another game which does support my controllers, all I have to do is uncheck a checkbox. It just works.

I almost didn’t download this application because it had more 1-star ratings than… well, any other ratings, not to put too fine a point on it. But I am so very glad that I went ahead and risked the five bucks on this app, because it works great. As other reviewers have commented, the UI isn’t as good as it should be, but that totally doesn’t matter—it works, and it’s easy enough to figure out. (For reference, the UI on JoyToKey is much better, if you’re coming over from the PC world—but again, doesn’t matter; it works. Won’t slow you down a bit.) I have an ancient Logitech Precision game controller that I swear by, and I just wanted to get it working with my Mac. Guess what? It’s working with my Mac. Problem solved, customer satisfied.