How does Windows' 'Game Controllers' properties connect to a joystick?

Question

The situation: We need to use a new game controller (with a joystick only) hardware on Windows 10 IoT. In the properties of "Game Controllers", moving the joystick is visible in the displayed rectangle with the '+'. Our software using DirectX8 API only reads 0 values for x/y axes.

What I've tried so far:

• DirectX 8: obviously doesn't work, also, it's deprecated
• Using Gaming.Input: not an option, we have no UWP
• XInput: not an option, we have no XBox (compatible) device
• Using joyGetPosEx from MultiMediaSystem: doesn't work

The question: Obviously Windows somehow can "see" the controller and also recognizes the joystick movements; so what API do they use in this little "Game Controllers" window?

Any other suggestion on how to read joystick data?

Answer 1

The question: Obviously Windows somehow can "see" the controller and also recognizes the joystick movements; so what API do they use in this little "Game Controllers" window?

It uses DirectInput (mainly IDirectInputDevice8::Poll)

Answer 2

Hello @Robin Holenweger,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

What kind of game controller do you mean?

If this is an XBOX gamecontroller, in the past I was able to connect to it using C#. Check out this blog post for details.

I used a Xbox One controller with wireless adapter for windows (to connect it to a laptop). More details are found here.

As you can see, I had to execute "Gamepad.GetCurrentReading();" in a infinite loop.

The library supports many more devices so you need to test this probably to see if this works with your game controller:

I hope this seems familiar to you.

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Answer 3

Any other suggestion on how to read joystick data?

Use Raw Input, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/about-raw-input.

Answer 4

Thanks for the contributions.

Meanwhile I found a working solution: joystick api (mmsystem.h/winmm.lib):- joyGetPos() to get the axis position (joyGetPosEx() if buttons and the like need to be read as well)

• joyConfigChanged() in case joyGetPos() returns an error, to force the driver to re-read the registry/configuration (e.g. for the case the joystick was exchanged)

This API seems to be older than DirectX 8 / DirectInput, but I have not found any hints that this might be deprecated (as compared to DirectInput).