I have noticed that in old SimBin games, such as GTR2 and GTL, not all wireless wheel buttons are available to assign to controls and, when some do work, it appears random which buttons the game will recognize. New games like iR/rF2/AMS2/etc recognize all buttons.
Is there anything that can be done or is this a limitation of old games?
Typically the oldest games (and even RaceRoom until 2019 or so, until they finally updated!) only read the first 32 buttons. Fanatec had some kind of workarounds also before that for this game alone.
Simucube 2 has the first 8 buttons (hmm, really the first 2 buttons, but it uses the whole byte for simplicity) to read the sequental shifter inputs from the D15 Accessory Port. This causes the wireless wheels to have buttons that might exceed the range of buttons that legacy games are able to read.
It’s actually maybe even a bit less buttons as really early games will only read maybe the first 16 buttons.
It has to do with the type of HID interface that is used…
It’d be nice if we got a consistent mapping for legacy games. Right now it seems random game to game. Would be nice to have the top row, maybe just button functions instead of rotary functions, then I’d have 10 buttons + 2 paddle shifters. If old games can map more than that (like the SimX button plate) then maybe map in couple more on the rotary switches.
I was able to use 15 buttons (buttons + paddles + horn) on this stock SimXperience button plate:
https://simxperience.com/products/accessories/accuforcesteering/accuforcebuttonbox.aspx
That would be of course the responsibility of the Manufactures of the wheels to make that happen… it has to do with the programming in how they aline the buttons with the HID Protocol AND more importantly if the HID Headers are backward compatible with Legacy Windows HID support…
David Tucker at iRacing and I have done a bit of development work on this. but ours was to mainly get full access and adjustability in Extended Joysticks… I currently have a full 128 button, 26 (16bit) axes, and 2 hat switches running. and David has been able to get 256 buttons with lower bit Axes fully recognized… These advancements will probably make for some very interesting devices in the future, so long as software supports the Massive Joystick configurations.