More than 4 controllers, Directinput and the change in build 4.0-314

[vrs99]

There's been a couple of posts in the past on how unfortunately Dolphin only shows 4 Xinput controllers, even if you have more plugged in that are also Directinput compatible. That's a well known and frustrating Windows implimentation. And it means that it's hard to play for example Bomberman Blast, Driift Mania, MK Double Dash in full on party mode

However, I know that 4.0.2 stable build does support more controllers. It shows both Xinput and Directinput controllers. It's just a shame that my Ryzen 2400g doesn't cut it with most games on that build. So I was wondering what happened. It seems that with build 4.0-314 the SDL was updated and since then we've had the controller limitation.

But this is not a hard limitation of the SDL library (or not anymore at least). And other emulators do have the option to readily allow more controllers. I think it was just something that was overlooked when updating SDL, because of course not many developers have more than 4 controllers plugged in to notice.

Having said all that, how would we be able to try and see if this can be changed? Or which developer would be most interested to look into this?

[iwubcode]

I can't say if we have anyone actively contributed that is interested in this. That being said, the main inputs developer (Billiard) was working on something similar a while back, you can see that here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/7614 . Someone else came up with a similar idea (using DInput) and that change is here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/10132 . However, we'd prefer the logic started by Billiard because it also solves an additional problem that DInput has.

Regardless, like all dev tasks, it's possible someone will come along and finish this work. It would be nice to see this in Dolphin, as you have mentioned.