ares is mixing up controllers in MacOS

[jeremiahrose]

In ares 141 on MacOS 14.6,

When I have two Xbox wireless controllers connected to the Mac (and working fine in other applications), and I map the first controller to port 1 and the other to port 2, ares seems to confuse these controllers with each other, e.g:

• Closing ares and restarting it sometimes results in the controllers being switched
• The controller that was previously binded as player one (in a single player game) stops working, when I reach for the other controller that one has become player one.
• The binding that's set in the settings is sometimes not obeyed by a running game, e.g if I bind a button on controller 1, the will only receive the button press from controller 2.

[Sintendo]

Issue is we're not calling setPathID in the IOKit implementation: https://github.com/ares-emulator/ares/blame/master/ruby/input/joypad/iokit.cpp#L204

As a result, we distinguish controllers only by vendor and product ID, which will be the same if you use identical controllers.

The question is: where do we get a value that can uniquely identify a controller on macOS? On Windows we use a hash of the USB device path, not sure if there's something similar to use on macOS.

[jcm93]

Irrespective of the above issue, I would definitely not recommend using the IOKit input driver; I have considered trying to deprecate/remove it. For controllers it's particularly unsuitable; there is no normalization of stick input or any standard features of a "modern" controller driver. It's more an API designed to write controller drivers with rather than a controller driver itself.

Can you confirm that you are in fact using the IOKit input driver, and if so, check if the same thing occurs using SDL for input?

[jeremiahrose]

To clarify, I am using the SDL driver, not IOKit. Actually, there is no option in the driver settings for IOKit, the only options are SDL, Quartz or None.

Issue is we're not calling setPathID in the IOKit implementation

Given the above, perhaps this is not the cause?

[Sintendo]

Quartz is what uses the IOKit implementation for joypads.

So while my analysis doesn't apply when using the SDL, I wouldn't be surprised if the SDL driver has pretty much the same underlying issue and we should pass something better for the pathID.