How to use JoyToKey?

[Spawk]

Just going to put this here as there seems to be some confusion about where/when/if people should use JTK.

JTK is keyboard encoder for gamepads. It converts gamepad inputs to keystrokes... so it's digital only! What does that mean? It means keyboard keys are either "on" or "off".

So any games/systems that utilize "pressure sensitive" buttons where a different action is performed depending on whether you just tapped or held down the button are completely lost. More importantly, the analog nature of the "stick" is gone! You can't push a little right to walk and all the way right to run for example. Being mapped to the four direction arrow keys also means there is no real diagonal. You might not notice on old Mame games because a lot of them used 4-way directional joysticks anyway.

All of that is fairly redundant these days anyway since I can't even think of an emulator that doesn't allow you to map controls to any device anymore. That's why I continually tell people in any tutorial or thread about JTK that "All in-game controls should be configured in the emulators themselves". The emulators are programmed to accept analog input.

So what is JTK good for then? Well it's good for accessing any keyboard commands that you can not directly configure to any button. For most emulators this will be things like exiting the emulator. Probably hard coded to "escape" and no option to change anywhere. Or maybe save/load savestates are activated by F6 and F7 respectively with no option to change. You can then map a button combo to activate these from your gamepad. RL's pause uses "Numpad +" to activate so I use a combo for that. You might want to add a "Disk Swap" button combo on some systems. These are the only kinds of mappings that should be your profiles in RLUI.

In this case, it's not merely "how I would do it", it's a matter of preserving analog controls. This is not exclusive to JTK either, Xpadder, Antimicro... anything that converts to keystrokes.