Keyboard and extended mouse bindings can't be enumerated the way gamepad
buttons can — a key binding is a value drawn from ~256 virtual-key codes,
not a member of a closed set. BackButtonConfig held four bare
BackButtonAction values, so there was nowhere to put one.
Introduce BackButtonBinding, a kind/code pair covering built-in actions,
keyboard VK codes, and extended mouse buttons. No behaviour change: only
Kind::Action is produced or consumed today. This is the groundwork for
capturing keys and mouse buttons in the remap window.
Both formats extend without a migration:
- Registry: packed as (kind << 16) | code. Every value written by earlier
builds is a bare BackButtonAction of 0-18, so its kind bits are already
zero and it decodes as Kind::Action. Action bindings still pack to their
bare value, so a downgrade also reads settings written by this build.
- WebView2: built-in actions keep their bare ids ("A", "leftMouse"), and
the open-ended kinds are prefixed ("key:32", "mouse:x1"). Flat strings
keep the hand-rolled JSON reader in RemapWindow usable, and the JS input
catalog needs no changes.
Unrecognised values — corrupt, or written by a future build that knows
kinds this one does not — degrade to None rather than being applied.
Verified the invariants with a standalone test over the full value space:
legacy decoding, pack and id round-trips for every kind, rejection of
malformed input, and the shipped defaults.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Back Buttons as Mouse Click" hijacked L4 and R4 unconditionally: the
virtual controller skipped their bindings entirely, so a paddle mapped to
RT silently did nothing while the option was on. Only the upper paddles
were affected, so the symptom read as "two of my four paddles are dead"
rather than pointing at the toggle. The same gate also suppressed the
Left/Right Click bindings the remap window already offered, meaning the
feature disabled the very capability it existed to provide.
The toggle was a strict subset of the remap window, which already offers
left and right click per paddle, so retire it rather than teach it to
cooperate:
- Remove the backMouseEnabled gates, the tray item, and the duplicate
L4/R4 handling in TrackpadMouse. Paddle mouse output now flows through
the single edge-detection path in ReadLoop.
- Default L4 and R4 to left click so a fresh install still clicks out of
the box.
- Add an explicit Off option to the picker. None was already a real
"do nothing", but Reset now yields left click, so without this there
would be no way to disable a paddle at all.
- Migrate BackButtons=1 into real bindings, filling in only paddles with
no binding of their own so an explicit mapping is never overwritten,
then delete the value so it runs once.
TrackpadMouse::Reset used to release a paddle held while game mode was
torn down. Removing its L4/R4 handling would have stranded the mouse
button down, so that cleanup moves to ReleasePaddleMouseButtons, which
also covers right click and runs on the enable, disable, and destructor
paths.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
vigem_target_add() plugs the child device in with IOCTL_VIGEM_PLUGIN_TARGET,
then waits for it to come up with IOCTL_VIGEM_WAIT_DEVICE_READY. When that
wait fails, the cleanup path calls vigem_target_remove() -- but target->State
is only set to VIGEM_TARGET_CONNECTED on the two success paths above it, so
the removal trips its own "State != VIGEM_TARGET_CONNECTED" guard and returns
without ever sending IOCTL_VIGEM_UNPLUG_TARGET. The device stays plugged into
the bus with no owning process, holding an XInput slot until the machine
reboots.
Observed locally: a pad created at 19:57:25 outlived the app by five hours and
several sessions, and every later session had to take the next serial. The
rapid enable/disable churn during device cycling is what triggers the wait
timeout in the first place.
Mark the target connected before the cleanup so the unplug is actually sent,
and pin the return to VIGEM_ERROR_TARGET_NOT_PLUGGED_IN -- a successful unplug
would otherwise report VIGEM_ERROR_NONE and register a target in pTargetsList
that is no longer plugged in. This is a local patch to the vendored b66d02d
ViGEmClient snapshot; upstream is archived, so no future sync will bring it in.
Also:
- VirtualController records which ViGEm call failed and its error code;
ControllerManager logs both. The old driverMissing line could not
distinguish a missing bus from a failed target add, which is exactly the
distinction needed to spot this leak.
- ShowViGEmBalloon() now latches the way ShowElevationBalloon() already did.
Every failed enable calls back into UpdateTrayIcon -- several times a second
during an acquire-retry loop -- so an unavailable driver produced a wall of
identical balloons. The latch clears once the driver is reachable again so a
genuine mid-session disappearance still warns. UpdateTrayIcon no longer
returns early on vigemMissing, so the icon and tooltip keep tracking the
controller instead of freezing.
- Reword that balloon: a disabled bus devnode reports the same
VIGEM_ERROR_BUS_NOT_FOUND as an uninstalled one, and "is not installed"
sends users looking in the wrong place.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Manual mode could not take the controller back from a running Steam. The
tray toggle called ControllerManager::EnableGameMode() once and discarded
the result, so a Blocked outcome -- Steam holding the exclusive write
handle -- was simply dropped. The auto modes wrapped the same call in
TryAcquireController(), which escalates a blocked claim to a device cycle
via the elevated helper and retries on re-arrival. Only closing Steam
freed the pad in manual mode.
The two paths diverged because acquiring is asynchronous: a blocked claim
fires a cycle through Task Scheduler and comes back seconds later as a
WM_DEVICECHANGE, so the retry loop lives in timers and message handlers
rather than on the stack. Each of those re-entry points has to re-answer
"do we still want control?", and the code answered it by recomputing
m_autoMode != Manual && WantControl(steamState) -- deriving intent from
Steam. That works in the auto modes, where Steam's state is the intent.
Manual mode had nothing to derive from: its intent lived in a menu click
that was never recorded anywhere. WantControl() said as much, returning
false for Manual with the comment "tray toggle decides" -- and the tray
toggle's decision went unstored.
Store it. m_wantControl replaces the derived guard at all three re-entry
points (the IDT_ACQUIRE and IDT_WAKE_POLL timers, and the arrival branch
of WM_DEVICECHANGE), leaving WantControl() with a single caller in
ApplySteamState. The toggle sets it and calls the shared path, so manual
mode gets the retry burst, device cycling, wake polling, and the failure
balloon it never had.
Release is unified the same way: ReleaseControl() lifts the yield branch
out of ApplySteamState, substituting m_steamWatcher.GetState() for the
SteamState parameter the manual caller has no access to. Manual toggle-off
now also cycles the devnode, so a running Steam sees an arrival event and
re-adopts the pad instead of leaving it unclaimed.
Three follow-on details:
- Manual toggle-on calls EnsureCycleTaskRegistered(), matching what
IDM_MODE_GAME already does, so the one-time UAC prompt lands on a menu
click rather than ambushing the first cycle.
- SetAutoMode(Manual) adopts IsGameModeActive() rather than inheriting a
stale m_wantControl from the auto mode being left.
- The toggle's menu label tracks m_wantControl in manual mode, not the
live handle state. Acquisition can spend several seconds cycling, and a
second click during that window should cancel rather than start over.
Both AUTO: log lines in the acquire path are now reachable from manual
mode, so they are relabelled ACQUIRE: -- these are exactly the lines read
when diagnosing a failed handoff, and the old prefix pointed away from it.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The receiver stopped working after a controller firmware update. Original
diagnosis and fix by @danbosscher; extended here for Bluetooth, Steam
handoff, and several defects found during QA on the hardware.
The puck publishes a controller interface per slot plus a management
endpoint, and on current firmware an empty slot rejects the lizard-mode
command outright.
- Enumerate only the controller collection (FF00:0001), excluding the
puck's management endpoint at FF00:0002
- Wait for a live 0x42/0x45 state report before sending feature commands,
and skip slots that never produce one
- Prefer an exclusive claim but accept a shared handle when Windows keeps
a compatible write handle open — only while Steam is absent, since a
handle held with Steam running is probably Steam's, and driving the
controller alongside it is worse than refusing. Refusing is what
escalates to the device cycle that takes the handle back.
- Add the Nereid receiver PID (0x1305)
Defects found by QA and fixed here:
- The battery payload is [chargeState, percent] on every transport, not
just Bluetooth. A 92% battery was reported, and fed to the DS4 battery
level, as 1%.
- Game mode could not tell an idle receiver from a contested one, so a
controller that was merely switched off triggered three device cycles,
restarting the receiver's devnodes for nothing.
- A receiver raises no device event when a slot becomes occupied, so
waking a controller went unnoticed for as long as it was left. Poll for
it instead.
- Overlapping cycles undid successful claims: a cycle is asynchronous, and
the arrivals it generated re-entered the acquire path and fired another
on top of it, ripping the device back out a second after game mode came
up. Cycles are now spaced.
- Failure was announced while the last cycle was still landing — the alert
fired one second before success. The verdict now waits out a grace
period.
Verified on the puck, Bluetooth, and wired: handoff to Steam on game
launch, reclaim afterwards, and no duplicate input.
Reclaiming takes around nine seconds on a four-slot receiver, dominated by
SetupDiCallClassInstaller tearing down each interface in turn. Three
attempts to shorten it (batching the cycle, a shorter settle, cycling only
the contested interface) all regressed the reclaim and were reverted; it
needs to be worked out against hardware rather than reasoned about.
Co-Authored-By: Dan Bosscher <danbosscher@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
EnsureCycleTaskRegistered only checked that the scheduled task existed,
never that it pointed at the current helper. A task left behind by an older
or relocated install still runs and schtasks still reports success, but it
executes a helper that may be gone or predate current device support — so
the cycle does nothing, the controller is never reclaimed from Steam, and
nothing anywhere reports a failure.
Not theoretical: an uninstall left a task pointing into Program Files while
the app ran from a build folder, and every cycle the app ordered was a
silent no-op. From the app's side a successful schtasks /Run is
indistinguishable from a working cycle, which made it expensive to find.
Query the task as XML and compare its <Command> against our own helper path,
re-registering on mismatch and logging that it happened. The XML declares
encoding="UTF-16" while redirected output is single-byte, so it is read
narrow; the path is compared against both codepage renderings rather than
guessing which the console used.
Also register at startup when the loaded mode is OffOnlyInGame, instead of
waiting for a cycle to discover the problem. Without it a missing or stale
task is only noticed during a cycle — which happens exactly when a game
launches — so the UAC prompt ambushed the user mid-launch. A no-op when the
task is present and correct, so installed users see no change. Installer
users never hit any of this: setup runs --register under the elevation it
already has.
Verified by relocating the app: launching from the registered location is
silent, launching from a copy logs the stale task and re-registers to the
new path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The controller now works wired, through the dongle, or paired over
Bluetooth, with the full feature set: game mode, rumble, trackpad haptics,
battery, PlayStation-mode gyro, and taking the controller back from a
running Steam.
Windows exposes the entire vendor protocol over HID-over-GATT under PID
0x1303 — feature reports, output reports, and the 0x45 state report (54
bytes, ~157 Hz) all work through the existing HidDevice stack, so support
is a thin layer rather than a new transport backend.
- Add SC2026_BT_PID to enumeration and a per-slot Transport tag, detected
from the interface path (HOGP GUID / bthenum markers win over PID
tokens) and logged on CONNECT/DISCONNECT
- Swap the battery report 0x43 payload bytes on Bluetooth slots — the
firmware sends [chargeState, percent], reversed from USB/dongle
- Bluetooth-specific disconnect alert copy, and a notification when
acquisition gives up rather than a silently dead pad
Device cycling had to be reworked for reclaiming the controller from
Steam. DIF_PROPERTYCHANGE reports success while leaving the device and
Steam's handle untouched; CM_Query_And_Remove_SubTree is vetoed by open
handles; pnputil /restart-device works once, then leaves the devnode
reboot-pending and refuses thereafter. Disable+enable works repeatedly.
Two traps found against live hardware. SetupDiCallClassInstaller returned
ERROR_INVALID_DATA for a disable Windows had genuinely performed — the app
logged the device removal a tenth of a second before the call reported
failure — so return codes cannot gate the re-enable, or the controller is
stranded disabled and needs Device Manager to recover. CM_Get_DevNode_Status
is now the source of truth: whether the node went down decides if a real
cycle happened, the re-enable always runs and retries until the node
confirms it is enabled, and only a stranded device counts as failure. Some
devices also reject a global scope change, so DICS_FLAG_CONFIGSPECIFIC is
tried as well.
SteamProbe becomes a transport discovery tool: detailed enumeration with
transport detection, interface selection, non-fatal lizard-off with a
raw-dump fallback, an output-report test, report-rate measurement, and
--enum / --imu modes. The windowless cycle helper gains its own cycle.log,
since it cannot share the tray app's events.log (held open _SH_DENYWR) and
was previously impossible to diagnose.
Verified on hardware: game mode, rumble, haptics, battery, IMU streaming,
clean removal on power-off/sleep/range loss with automatic reconnect,
yielding to Steam on game launch, and reclaiming afterwards (~1.2s). Also
confirmed the firmware enforces one host transport at a time, so no
cross-transport deduplication is needed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Control modes (tray 'Control Mode' submenu, persisted):
- Manual: tray toggle only (grayed labels now explain why when disabled)
- Auto - Off while Steam running: yield the controller whenever steam.exe
runs; reclaim ~6s after it exits (debounced against Steam self-restarts)
- Auto - Off ONLY while in Steam game: yield only while RunningAppID != 0
SteamWatcher polls the Steam process and RunningAppID every 2s with
asymmetric debounce: transitions toward more Steam activity are reported
immediately (yield fast), transitions away must hold ~6s.
Taking the device from a running Steam requires invalidating its HID write
handle. A new elevated helper (SteamlessDeviceCycle.exe) restarts the
controller device node (unplug/replug equivalent) on demand via a
highest-privileges scheduled task, registered by the installer or a one-time
UAC prompt. The tray app itself NEVER runs elevated: an elevated foreground
window blocks unelevated SendInput via UIPI, which froze Steam Input's
desktop cursor whenever the tray menu was open. The same cycle mechanism
hands the device to an already-running Steam on game launch (Steam only
opens controllers on arrival events).
Crash safety: an unhandled-exception filter best-effort restores lizard
mode without taking locks; the firmware's own revert timeout remains the
final fallback. ClaimExclusive now restores shared access on failure
instead of leaving the device handle closed.
Diagnostics for field disconnect reports:
- Event log at %LOCALAPPDATA%\SteamlessController\events.log (512KB
rotation, read-shareable): connect/disconnect causes, game mode
transitions with failure reasons, battery changes, stalls, keepalive
failures, auto-mode decisions. 'Open Event Log' in the tray menu.
- Silent-stall detection: no reports for 4s while enumerated (battery
death, sleep, wireless drop) is now detected, logged, and alerted with
the last battery reading.
- Disconnect/stall alert balloons, suppressed for intentional handoffs,
with a 'Disconnect Notifications' toggle for users with odd setups.
Startup reverts to the plain HKCU Run key (the elevated-logon-task variant
from an interim build is migrated back and cleaned up). Installer ships and
registers the helper and unregisters it on uninstall; version 1.8.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Introduces a ControllerPlatform enum (Xbox, PlayStation) and a full
DualShock 4 translation path alongside the existing Xbox 360 one.
Switching platforms live tears down and recreates the virtual device.
The selection persists in the registry and is exposed via a
"Controller Platform" submenu in the tray context menu.
DS4 translation maps face buttons to Cross/Circle/Square/Triangle,
encodes the D-pad as a HAT switch (with diagonal support), converts
signed 16-bit axes to uint8 with Y-axis inversion, and routes right
trackpad clicks to the DS4 touchpad button.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Conflicts resolved:
- ControllerManager.cpp: take main's slot-based EnableGameMode/
DisableGameMode dispatch; wire the rumble callback into
EnableGameModeSlot and add SetRumble(0,0) to DisableGameModeSlot
so rumble stops cleanly before vc is torn down.
- VirtualController.h: keep both RumbleCallback/OnRumble (ours) and
the new Update(backCfg, backMouseEnabled) signature (main's).
Co-Authored-By: Dylan Deverill <ddeverill@gmail.com>
- Drop Tick()/m_wantsGameMode auto-enable machinery (out of scope for
this PR — belongs in a separate submission)
- Remove unused CMD_TRIGGER_RUMBLE constant
- Fix WriteOutputReport comment to accurately describe padding behaviour
- Fix CancelIo OVERLAPPED use-after-free: drain with GetOverlappedResult
before the stack OVERLAPPED goes out of scope
- Strip redundant /wd4819 /wd4828 MSVC flags; /utf-8 already covers them
- Add comment to HeartbeatLoop explaining the 40 ms tick rationale
Co-Authored-By: Dylan Deverill <ddeverill@gmail.com>
Introduces a WebView2-based remap window (double-click tray icon or
'Remap Back Buttons...' context menu) that lets users assign any of
L4/L5/R4/R5 to a face button, bumper, trigger, d-pad direction, stick
click, Menu/View, mouse button, or 'none' (natural behavior).
- BackButtonConfig: new enum + struct; values stable as registry DWORDs
- RemapWindow: chromeless WebView2 window with a button picker and
press-to-detect capture mode; settings persist across launches
- ControllerManager: StartButtonCapture/StopButtonCapture API with
rising-edge HID detection for all mappable targets
- VirtualController: ApplyBackAction injects the mapped XInput button
each frame; mouse-button actions are edge-detected in the read loop
- TrackpadMouse: back-button mouse-click handling decoupled from remap
- TrayApp: wires up the remap window, saves/loads all back button
settings to HKCU\Software\SteamlessController
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Start with Windows toggle in tray menu — writes/removes the Run registry
key so the app launches automatically at login
- Inno Setup installer script for packaging the release exe
- CMakePresets.json for named debug/release build configurations
- README updated with correct Visual Studio 2025 build commands and a
note for VS 2022 users
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
