Using a Steering Wheel with ppsspp

[kumijorma]

I won't start a new thread, since this issue has already it's own thread.

I bought Gran Turismo for PSP a week ago and I was able to get it fully working with Logitech G27 on PPSSPP 1.2.2. Even pedals got mapped as "X" and "Square". On Logitech Gaming Software, I created a new profile for PPSSPP with following settings:

Wheel angle: 180 degrees (it makes the wheel turn 360 degrees, I'll explain later, why I came up to this setting.)
Spring force: 50 % (Because PSP doesn't support rumble or force feedback, 50 % of spring force should be the most realistic setting for the most of the cars of GT.)

With default settings, the deadzone will be terrible. The trick to get right feel on the steering wheel is to use "Dinput analog settings" for fine-tuning the feel of the wheel:

Deadzone radius: 0.10
Analog mapper mode: On
Analog mapper low-end (inverse deadzone): 0.6
Analog mapper high-end (axis sensitivity): 1.0

Those settings (or around them) should make the wheel feel "natural".

So, most of the cars have 900 degrees of wheel angle (F1-cars have only about 380 degrees), so why not going for that? Well, original PS1 and PSP are designed to be played with analog sticks with about 90 degrees of turning angle, so with them, it's impossible to get natural feeling out of them if set as high as 900 degrees. The reason is the deadzone: it's already set to some static value that can't be altered, so going to 360 degrees, the deadzone doesn't jump too wide, but with 900 degrees, it will be insane, about 180 degrees, of which doesn't feel natural at all anymore. I tried to get around this by tweaking "Dinput analog settings", but failed.

In the end, I'm very happy with the current development speed of PPSSPP.

I have only one wish for Henrik:

Please, add support for game controllers with more than 16 buttons in the future. It would be awesome to map "X", "Square" and "O"-buttons to their correct places on Logitech G27 and similar controllers without the need of using external apps like Xpadder or AntiMicro.

Thanks for great emulator!

EDIT:

I found an even better solution:

1. Eliminate the unnecessary dead zone by adjusting the inverse deadzone to 0.75.
2. Tune the axis sensitivity for your analog device so that you'll see "Axis: 1 (value 1.000)" at "Test analogs"-screen, when you pull the stick or wheel full left / right. For my wheel, I got it at 0.93.
3. Now, apply some deadzone radius. Even as low as 0.01 might be just enough.
4. Do "Test analogs" again, and now the stick or wheel should be running all smoothly right after the dead zone till the end of range.
5. If you are using a wheel, lower the inverse deadzone somewhere between 0.25 and 0.75. I got the smoothest turning for all of my racing games by setting it to 0.50.

Deadzone radius: 0.01
Analog mapper mode: X
Analog mapper low-end (inverse deadzone): 0.50
Analog mapper high-end (axis sensitivity): 0.93

Now, you shouldn't need to change the sensitivity from an external program (like Logitech Gaming Software) either.

I also fixed the number of supported mappable buttons on PPSSPP 1.9.3 >. It's 16, not 19 as I had remembered. I still need to map buttons 17–22 with Xpadder to my wheel-setup for PPSSPP.