USB Game Controllers and Windows 8

Once upon a time, long ago, I had an Unreal Tournament problem. The problem was that I was playing too much Unreal Tournament. So I gave it up and, since then, haven’t played games much at all.  Recently, however, I found myself pet sitting a puppy that needed to be kept in a confined space, eg: my office, and needed company, eg: me, so I grabbed a game I’d read about: Guacamelee.  And I had some Nintendo style knockoff controllers laying around from having built a Raspberry PI MAME machine for fun.  I installed the game, plugged in the controllers, confirmed Windows saw them, and fired up the game.  It couldn’t see the controller at all.

I did two things to fix this problem.  First, I installed DirectX.  Secondly, I downloaded x360ce, unpacked it into the root directory of the game, renamed the xinput1_3.dll to xinput9_1_0.dll (which is already done for you in the download above), fired up x360ce.exe to confirm it could see the controller, killed it, and fired up the game.  Voila – controller.