Minor issue with hid-remapper on Atari Gamestation Pro

General
1

I am using HID Remapper to connect a third-party joystick to the Atari Gamestation Pro. I’ve got everything working great, with one minor exception. The joystick works great in both the system menus and for actual game play in the emulator(s). The problem that I have encountered is that when running an Atari 2600 game that supports both color and B&W modes, when I press UP on the joystick, the game switches from color to B&W mode. This does not happen with the native, in-box controller, only with the third-party controller. My configuration is based on the “analog stick cardinal directions to D-pad” example, with added remappings for the buttons. The problem that I am experiencing is very similar to the problem indicated here:

https://github.com/Provenance-Emu/Provenance/issues/471

I am still trying to chase down the cause myself. My guess is that the remapper is sending extra reports that the embedded emulator is incorrectly interpreting as whatever control would toggle the virtual color/B&W switch in the emulator, but that is just a guess. Looking at USB HID reports in a USB monitor program seems to show that the remapper is reporting extra NULL reports along with the joystick movement report. Windows-based test programs and the rest of the console device seem to work fine with or otherwise ignore the problem. I’ll continue to poke at this myself but I wanted to post this here in case anyone else has encountered this and/or has any idea about what’s going on. Thank you!

2

Did you make any modifications to match the first party controllers or are you just using one of the existing emulated device types and if so which one?

3

Thanks for the response. On the Settings page in the Configuration UI, I chose the “PS4 arcade stick” as the emulated device type, since PS4 controllers work natively with the Atari Gamestation Pro.

4

Wanted to post a follow-up with my findings. I ordered an actual PS4 controller from eBay and connected it to the Atari Gamestation Pro. The same problem occurs. This means that the bug is in the console itself and not in the remapper’s emulation of the PS4 controller. The problem does not occur with the in-box controller, so I am next going to try to configure the remapper to emulate that controller and see if that works better.