Sticks appearing again at the end of define joystick buttons process often leads to frustration

[bryanparadis]

Hello,

I myself have been bitten by this before when mapping analog stick for usb N64 controllers where I map d-pad, map stick 1 and then map a few more buttons and then finish the process early. If I do so the stick only works left and right missing up and down. I have also seen a handful of other people make the same mistake as well as I can see many people having a similar issue in search results. I am not sure the logic for why it appears again at the end of the process but I suppose there could be a valid reason. I just helped one person figure it out and it took me an hour and they had been trying to figure it out for 8 hours. I had even figured it out once before and some other people that use misterfpga more than me also didn't remember that quirk.

Not sure what could be done to make this more intuitive or make sure you go through the entire wizard. Currently people think that stick setup is done after being prompted for stick 1 and stick 2 already. They are not expecting sticks to come up again at the very end of the process and finish early with enter. This leaves them in a broken state and they are not sure why.

Thanks,

Bryan Paradis

[birdybro]

First stick input is for detection of the features of the gamepad you have. Some gamepads won't show stick 2 for instance upon going through the detection steps.

The last one is to actually map it.

[sorgelig]

Don't expect to have the same plug-and-play way as you have on game console (like PS5. XBox) having its own gamepads. MiSTer tries to support zoo of gamepads, so it needs some cooperation from user. More options system provides - more RTFM it needs.
There is a good logic behind the way MiSTer using to define a gamepad. Birdybro partially explained this already. Gamepad may have sticks but it's not required to use them as analog inputs. Especially, many cores don't have analog stick support. Sometimes it's good to have sticks swapped or make them work as digital joysticks.

[bryanparadis]

I understand the reality of MiSTer and that it isn't going to be plug-n-play. Personally I've wasted time on figuring this out in the past and also I've had to troubleshoot it for other people as well. Troubleshooting is kind of my thing and it still took me an hour to figure out why mapping a N64 controller sticks resulted in only X movement and not Y movement.

The manual does state:

If you press ++enter++ to "Finish" too early, you might miss the Analog Joystick configuration step which is important if you have analog joysticks.

Though this doesn't seem to be enough to avoid this specific pitfall. I even read it during troubleshooting but didn't quite catch on as one axis direction was working. Maybe labeling detection steps as detection rather than binding as it seems rather opaque to me. Or warning against finishing the wizard early in the UI. Or perhaps a summary of the steps and what the result was. Users seem to have a false impression that during the define joystick button flow that they've already mapped the sticks.

I had a quick look but wasn't able to figure out how the flow worked with the time I had. The last stick step comes after mouse stuff and menu stuff. It seems very separated. Perhaps the logic requires it to be. That's ok if so but I am sure it would save people some time and frustration with some kind of tweak to the flow/design.