Atari800MacX Help
Preferences Window
Gamepads Tab



The Gamepads Tab allows the buttons on Joysticks or Gamepads to be assigned to Atari Controller Buttons or keypresses.  It also allows the user to specify if analog or digital joysticks/hats on gamepads are used to emulate the Atari joysticks. Note, the emulator only scans for Gamepads when starting up, so Gamepads plugged in during operation will not be recognized.  You must quit the emulator, and rerun it to have them recognized.



Button Assignment
These controls allows the user to assign Atari buttons or key presses to up to 24 gamepad buttons.  Use the Assignment pulldown to select the gamepad button to assign.  Then the user can assign a different Atari control to that gamepad button for Computer (400/800) mode, and for 5200 mode.  Once assignments are made, configurations must be saved using the Save or Save As item of the Configuration Pulldown.  Saved configurations are then assigned to specific gamepads in the Joystick Preference section below.

One of the types of Atari controls that may be assigned to gamepad buttons is joystick directions.  This is used for gamepads such as the iStick, which have a set of four buttons for use as directional buttons, but these buttons do not identify themselves as a digital hat.  You may assign the joystick directions to buttons in this section, then select Gamepad Buttons as the joystick type in the section below.

The user may also use the "Identify Gamepad ...." buttons to bring up a window which will allow them to determine which buttons are which on the Gamepads.  This window also gives the name of the gamepad, as well as showing how many buttons, analog, and digital joysticks it has.  If a particular Gamepad is not plugged in, it's button will be greyed out.
Joystick Preference
These controls allow you to do things:
There are 3 types of Gamepad devices that may be used to simulate the joystick.  The first is an analog joystick. The second is a digital hat.  And the third, is a set of gamepad buttons assigned in a Button Assignment Configuration above. The second of the two pulldowns for each gamepad in this section chooses the type of joystick to use for that gamepad.  If Analog joysticks or Digital Hats are not present on your gamepad, their menu items will be disabled, or greyed out. Digital Hats and Gamepad Buttons are not useful for simulating paddles, as they only have 3 positions, far left, far right, and centered.

The second pulldown allows you to select from more than one joystick or hat on your gamepad, if they are present.  For Analog joysticks, there is also another option, Multi stick, for gamepads which have multiple joysticks.  With this option selected, each joystick assigned to the gamepad in the Controllers Tab will be assigned to a different joystick on the gamepad, up to the number of joysticks.  This is useful for such 5200 games as Robotron and Space Dungeon, where both 5200 controllers were used by one player

The button assignment pulldown allows you to assign a button configuration to each Gamepad.  The Standard configuration assigns the joystick trigger to each button.  The other custom configurations may be created in the Button Assignment section above.