I recently got a controller from 8BitDo that has an extra pair of triggers and two extra face buttons for screenshots or whatever you want really. Issue is, not only do do my emulators not recognize these buttons, but is seems Linux Mint doesn’t know they exist at all. Even bringing up a program to map buttons to keys doesn’t show any input when those buttons are pressed. Does anyone know how to make these buttons recognizable? They’d be really helpful for toggling fast forward on games with long loading screens for instance or just resetting the system on a whim.
8BitDo controllers have a few different controller API modes, but they’re limited by those APIs. By default they recommend using XInput with PC, but XInput is based on 360 and limited to the set of buttons a first-party 360 controller normally has. This means that the Star/Share button doesn’t exist, nor do the additional rear buttons. Instead, they can be mapped to certain functions within the controller firmware. Unfortunately you have to use the 8BitDo Ultimate Software to configure them, and that isn’t supported on Linux (doesn’t work in Wine either, I tried). There’s also an Android version of the Ultimate Software you can try, but I think it only supports some older 8BitDos. There may be some default Star+button combos already, I forget what they do.
If you set it to Switch mode, that enables the Share button to work the way it does on a Switch controller, but software might not recognize it. And the rear buttons still don’t exist as distinct buttons since Switch controllers don’t have those, they are only ever for macro remapping within the firmware. I don’t think there’s any way to make them distinct.
Once you map them, do the settings stay on the controller itself? Dual booting or a VM with hardware pass through might be a (tedious) way to get that configured if so.
Yes. Some models even let you have multiple profiles configured with a button to toggle between them - on my Pro 2 I have profiles for Nintendo layout and Xbox layout.
Thanks for the info. Just got into Linux gaming recently and appreciate the first account stories since much of the internet seems kind of useless nowadays for looking up facts unfortunately.