Ported from BT411, which needed the same thing for its glass cockpit. PadRIO reads XInput, which covers Xbox-class pads and nothing else. A flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals or a wheel arrive through DirectInput instead, and until now the game could not see any of them - the only generic-joystick path left was the 1995 single- device DIJoystick behind L4CONTROLS=DIJOYSTICK, which is untouched here. L4JOY is the reader: up to four devices as normalized state blocks, hot- plug re-enumeration on the same ~3 s cadence PadRIO uses to look for a pad, and a device lost mid-race zeroed rather than left holding whatever was pressed when it went. XInput-class devices are excluded by VID/PID against the RawInput paths carrying the "IG_" marker - without that an Xbox pad arrives through both APIs and every button counts twice. bindings.txt gains four rows in the grammar it already had, using its own vocabulary (deadzone/rate) rather than BT411's: joydev <slot> [product-name substring] joyaxis <src> axis <axis> [invert] [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>] joybutton <n> button <addr> [toggle] joyhat <n> <up|down|left|right> button <addr> Slots resolve to a live device every poll, by name substring or ordinal, so unplugging and replugging does not rewrite anyone's file. Two things the pod's shape forced that BT411 solved differently: Pedals - a signed composite axis that decomposes into the pod's two pedals, positive right and negative left. The pod has a pedal each side; a twist grip or rudder bar is one signed control, and pressing one or the other but never both is exactly what it wants to say. It is a channel name like any other, so a pad stick can drive the turn too. A joyaxis on Throttle with no rate is a real lever and OWNS the channel - full travel maps onto the 0..1 the pod runs on, instead of nudging the accumulator that a spring-centred pad stick has to use. RP412JOYCONFIG=1 (joyconfig.bat) runs the capture wizard before the console screen: it asks the player to move each control, and derives the sign convention from the DIRECTION of the move. That is the point of it - a stick that reads positive pushed right and one that reads negative are equally common, and no amount of documentation gets a player to work out which they own. It writes only its own section, between marker lines, so hand-edited keyboard and pad rows survive re-running it. The wizard also prints every axis at rest before it starts. A driver that refuses the +-32767 range we ask for reports its own, and an axis then sits hard over instead of near zero; seeing "X +1.00" on an untouched stick is the difference between a five-minute fix and a bug report that says it configured itself. Each capture reports the move it saw for the same reason. Verified on the Logitech Extreme 3D on this machine. Enumeration finds it and excludes the Xbox pad, which still arrives separately through XInput. Every row shape parses - 7 axes, 2 buttons, 4 hat directions - and three deliberately malformed rows (a bad axis name, button 99, a "sideways" hat) are each rejected by line number rather than silently dropped. The wizard lists the device with its axes at rest reading X +0.00 Y -0.01 RZ -0.04 SL0 +1.00, waits on the first prompt without self-triggering, and with a hand on the stick captures X to steering, Y to pitch, RZ to the pedals and SL0 to the throttle, inverting the ones that read backwards. Running the captures through to a written file needs a hand on the stick, so that part is the machine's to confirm, not this build's. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
8.5 KiB
Red Planet 4.12 — controls map
Generated from the default bindings.txt (the file the game writes
beside the exe on first run). Everything here is rebindable: edit that
file and restart, or delete it to get these defaults back.
Grammar reminder, from the file's own header:
key <name> button <addr> [toggle]
key <name> axis <axis> deflect <n> # held, springs back
key <name> axis <axis> rate <n> # walks per second, sticks
pad <button> button <addr> [toggle]
padaxis <src> axis <axis> [invert] [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>]
Xbox controller
( LB ) Panic Throttle / reverse ( RB )
( LT ) Left pedal Right pedal ( RT )
______________________________________________________
/ \
/ [Back] [Start] \
| unbound unbound |
| |
| ,--. (Y) |
| ( L ) stick X / Y Upper |
| `--' (X) (B) |
| +---+ Pinky Middle |
| D-pad --> |hat| (A) |
| +---+ Main |
| |
| ,--. |
| ( R ) throttle (Y axis) |
\ `--' /
\____________________________________________________ _/
| Control | Does | RIO address |
|---|---|---|
| Left stick | Joystick X / Y (inverted, deadzone 0.24 — pod convention) | axes |
| Right stick Y | Throttle, as a rate: hold to wind it up or down, position sticks | axis |
| Left / right trigger | Left / right pedal (deadzone 0.12) | axes |
| A | Main trigger | 0x40 |
| B | Middle | 0x46 |
| X | Pinky | 0x45 |
| Y | Upper | 0x47 |
| LB | Panic | 0x3D |
| RB | Throttle button — reverse thrust | 0x3F |
| D-pad | Hat: up / back / left / right (look) | 0x42 0x41 0x44 0x43 |
| Start, Back | unbound — yours to map | — |
The config buttons (0x37/0x36) are the first two buttons of the
Upper Right MFD's top row, reachable from the keyboard on 9 and 0.
Start and Back ship unbound so you can put anything there; the
commented lines in bindings.txt show how.
Keyboard
Flight cluster — the number pad
+-----+-----+-----+
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 7 / 9 left / right pedal
| Lped| fwd |Rped | 8 / 2 stick forward / back
+-----+-----+-----+ 4 / 6 stick left / right
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 0 main trigger
| left| |right|
+-----+-----+-----+
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| | back| |
+-----+-----+-----+
| 0 | . |
| trigger | |
+-----------+-----+
Shift throttle up Ctrl throttle down Alt reverse thrust
(both throttle keys walk the axis and it holds where you leave it)
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| NumPad 8 / 2 | Stick forward / back |
| NumPad 4 / 6 | Stick left / right |
| NumPad 7 / 9 | Left / right pedal |
| NumPad 0, Space | Main trigger (0x40) |
| Shift / Ctrl | Throttle up / down (position holds) |
| Alt | Reverse thrust (0x3F) |
| Arrow keys | Hat — look up / back / left / right |
| Alt + Q | Abort the mission (score banked, back to menu or lobby) |
Panel buttons — the letter and number rows
The rest of the keyboard is the pod's button board, laid out as it is printed on the panel. Each MFD has 8 buttons (a 4-wide top row and a 4-wide bottom row); the keyboard rows run left to right across the three upper MFDs, then the two lower ones.
UPPER MFDs Left MFD Middle MFD Right MFD
top row 1 2 3 4 | 5 6 7 8 | 9 0 - =
bottom row Q W E R | T Y U I | O P [ ]
0x2F..0x2C 0x27..0x24 0x37..0x34
0x2B..0x28 0x23..0x20 0x33..0x30
LOWER MFDs Left MFD Right MFD
top row A S D F (G unbound) H J K L
bottom row Z X C V (B unbound) N M , .
0x0F..0x0C 0x07..0x04
0x0B..0x08 0x03..0x00
COLUMNS beside the map
Secondary F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 0x10..0x15
Screen F7 F8 F9 F10 F11 F12 0x18..0x1D
G and B are deliberately unbound: they are the physical gap between the Lower Left and Lower Right MFD clusters on the real board.
Every one of these buttons is also clickable on screen — the red strips around each MFD and the amber strips beside the map are the same addresses, and they light up when the game commands their lamps.
Not bound by default
The pilot keypad (0x50–0x5F) and external operator keypad
(0x60–0x6F) have no keys assigned — the game never reads them. They
remain bindable if you want them (they arrive as arcade RIO key events).
RGB keyboard lighting
If the machine has a Dynamic Lighting keyboard, bound panel keys mirror
the pod's lamps: red for the MFD banks, amber/yellow for the Secondary
and Screen columns, blinking in step with the on-screen buttons.
Unbound keys go dark. Set RP412KEYLIGHT=0 in environ.ini to switch
it off.
Flight sticks, HOTAS and rudder pedals
Anything that is not an Xbox-class pad — a flight stick, a HOTAS
throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals, a wheel — comes in through
DirectInput rather than XInput, and needs to be told which axis is
which. Run joyconfig.bat once. It asks you to move each control in
turn, works out which device and axis you moved and which way round it
reads, and writes the joystick rows of bindings.txt. Then it carries
on into the setup screen so you can try them straight away.
It only writes its own section, between two marker lines, so anything you have edited yourself survives re-running it. Xbox-class controllers need none of this — they are the pad rows above and work out of the box.
By hand, the rows look like this:
joydev 0 T.16000M # or a bare slot number
joyaxis X axis JoystickX invert deadzone 0.08
joyaxis Y axis JoystickY invert deadzone 0.08
joyaxis RZ axis Pedals deadzone 0.08 # twist grip works both pedals
joyaxis SL0 axis Throttle deadzone 0 # a real lever owns the channel
joybutton 0 button 0x40 # trigger
joyhat 0 up button 0x42
Axis names are DirectInput's — X Y Z RX RY RZ SL0 SL1 — where a twist
grip is usually RZ and a HOTAS throttle usually Z or SL0.
Two things are worth knowing. Pedals is a signed axis that drives the
pedal pair, positive for the right pedal and negative for the left, so
one rudder bar or twist grip works both the way a foot never could. And
a joyaxis on Throttle with no rate is treated as a real lever: its
full travel is the throttle range, rather than nudging a position the
way a spring-centred pad stick has to.
Rebinding
bindings.txt sits beside the exe, written with the full default layout
and its own documentation on first run. Change a line, restart the game.
Delete the file to restore these defaults — worth doing after an update,
since an existing file is never overwritten.
Examples:
key J button 0x40 # main trigger on J as well
pad X button 0x40 # move the trigger to the X button
key NumPadAdd axis Throttle rate 0.75 # throttle on numpad +/-
key NumPadSubtract axis Throttle rate -0.75
padaxis LeftStickX axis JoystickX deadzone 0.15 # drop 'invert' to flip X
Addresses: 0x00–0x47 are the lamp buttons above, 0x50–0x6F the
keypads. Axis names: Throttle, LeftPedal, RightPedal, JoystickX,
JoystickY, Pedals. Key names follow the .NET Keys naming (A–Z, D0–D9
for the digit row, F1–F12, NumPad0–NumPad9, Up, Down,
Left, Right, Space, Return, Shift, Ctrl, Alt,
OemMinus, Oemplus, Oemcomma, OemPeriod, OemOpenBrackets,
OemCloseBrackets, …).