Virtual Gamepad Emulation Framework
Yo,
a stable release for real this time 😅 I reverted the dummy audio device pseudo-fix I blogged about in the past.
But we have some progress also; the axis value offset calculation in XnaGuardian was faulty due to my impressive math skills 😁 This is also fixed now, meaning that the values submitted via the override functions now get reflected 1:1 on the output like you’d expect.
’till next time!
Ey,
I did a lot of research and testing the last couple days and have to share some results. In the latest release I assumed I fixed the bug where a deaf XBOX 360 headset was appearing on the system when – for some odd reason – the Up button on the D-Pad was pressed.
After an awful lot of searching and reading various threads I came across the IRP_MN_QUERY_DEVICE_RELATIONS request, which seemed to be linked to my particular issue. Since ViGEm uses the WDF I assumed that this request was handled differently than in WDM, the driver model that the ancestor ScpVBus uses. Well, I was partially right; the request does indeed get handled per default by the KMDF internally so i decided to just intercept and fail the BusRelations Request in my driver which at first glance seemed like it did the trick! Sadly due to all the euphoria I slapped together a new build and released it without further testing 🙄
But in reality I wasn’t intentionally fixing the issue with my code like I thought; I just forgot to read all of the documentation which stated that you also need to call IoSkipCurrentIrpStackLocation(Irp) after pre-processing the IRP or else! Well, from what I understand this ruined the IRPs stack in a way that the request got left in a pending state which looked fine after you create and use the emulated device but goes horribly wrong once you try to cleanly unplug it.
Ok, so I know what I have to revert but now we aren’t any closer to a proper solution like we were prior to this release 😕 Further investigation followed. In this case it was once again time for a Wireshark session and a real physical X360 pad. Simply pressing and holding the Up button on the D-Pad really isn’t a challenge and we receive the following expected INTERRUPT_IN traffic:
0000 1b 00 10 10 d5 b1 86 b8 ff ff 00 00 00 00 09 00
0010 01 01 00 02 00 81 01 14 00 00 00 00 14 01 00 00
0020 00 5e f5 24 03 20 fa 4f 08 00 00 00 00 00 00
The last twenty bytes represent the transfer buffer content of one input HID report (well, it isn’t HID-compatible but you know what I mean) which looks just fine. Although this doesn’t differ in any way like my emulation layer does the native pad won’t announce it’s headphone jack while the virtual one does. I’m baffled. And out of ideas. For the moment.
I’ll be back on this! 😠
I know the latest ViGEm release has bin out for quite some time but I have to drop a few notes on this one. Although I managed to fix an annoying long-term bug it seems I went a bit overboard from what users are reporting. I will investigate and – yet again – fix it and also try to provide some close-to-stable user-mode libraries for the published driver editions as well. Thanks again for the patience and continuous feedback and last but not least the slowly but steadily rising donations 😘
’till next time!
Heya,
I just updated the forums to the latest and greatest beta of Flarum and switched over from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x. I also changed the mail driver to use PHP’s built-in mailing function and successfully tested it a couple minutes ago. Hopefully you can now finally keep updated on posts via mail notifications. If you don’t, just… well… drop me a quick mail 😁
Thanks for your patience, keep in mind that Flarum is beta software (but I love it! 😍)
Cya!
There was a bug in my version helper utility which I use to keep the projects version information in sync. This could have lead to problems when updating the drivers since a driver with the same version might have already been present in the Windows Driver Store. This will be fixed in the next release (among other things).
I got asked about a long-term roadmap for the ViGEm project so here it is. It’s sorted by appearance in my head, not priority or chronology or something that’s close to a system 😜
I won’t sugarcoat it; I suck at documenting my APIs and ideas 😅 It’s not that I’d dislike documentation but I’d rather spend my time on coding, reverse engineering and solving riddles. Since the projects are intended to provide a framework for other developers it’s crucial to improve this part.
I tend to change APIs without version bumps which isn’t best practice at least 😁 I should also mention that before this project I didn’t really design publicly available APIs so I just make up things as I go. Feedback always welcome of course 😉
When diving into new frameworks or libraries I tend to search for some example implementations first instead of pondering over documentation. I typically whack together some simple console application if I wanna test new features and tend to forget them after success. This should improve massively since nothing beats nicely commented ready-to-copyuse code.
Although I successfully created a working proof-of-concept there’s still a long road ahead of me if I wanna provide stable XBONE Controller emulation. Since hunting bugs and reacting to user feedback was my main priority the last couple month I kinda procrastinated on this topic. I don’t want to ditch it though since there is obvious user demand for this feature.
Coding currently eats up a lot of my time (besides other pesky real-life tasks 😜) so I’m always short on updates and general social-media stuff. I should really rename this to “respond to messages in time” generally. Oh well… 😇
Yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten about this delicate topic and I am aware about the community demands. It’s just that the driver development ate up so much time and brain power I didn’t have enough energy left for support, fixes or new features at all. Hope you can understand that 🙃
There sure is a lot I forgot to include in this post but that’s all my brain can take at this time so… time for more procrastination! 😅
Cya!
Heya,
just a quick update on what’s currently in my pipeline:
So thanks for your patience, see ya soon!
…so, don’t use it 😁 It worked in my VMware, doesn’t work on bare metal. Sucks. Fix coming up soon.
Thanks, Josh! They accept my mails now 😀
Yet another recent “Fuck you” from Microsoft: it seems that Hotmail (or Live or whatever it’s called these days) won’t accept e-mails from my dedicated server despite its crystal clear Anti-Spam-Reputation:
Feb 26 11:44:36 lvps176-28-14-79 postfix/smtp[21858]: 19FFF1167A7: to=<redacted@live.se>, relay=mx4.hotmail.com[65.55.33.135]:25, delay=1, delays=0/0/0.88/0.16, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host mx4.hotmail.com[65.55.33.135] said: 550 SC-001 (COL004-MC6F12) Unfortunately, messages from 176.28.14.79 weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
Well, that’s unfortunate but nothing I can do about at the moment since they don’t even have an IP removal submission form or any other sane way of contacting someone who cares, so… If you’re a Hotmail user and haven’t had a reply from me: that’s why 😠 I recommend the forums as an alternative way to contact me. Cheers!