Step-by-step InputMapper setup and usage guides.
PC Game Pass gives you a large library of games through the Xbox app on Windows, but it has one frustrating quirk for PlayStation controller owners: plug in a DualShock 4 and many of those games simply do not see it. The controller works in Windows, the light bar glows, and yet the game sits…
Not every PC game lives in Steam. Standalone installers, itch.io downloads, DRM-free releases, and small indie executables shared as a simple zip file all share one trait: there is no launcher standing between you and the game to fix your controller for you. If the game expects an Xbox-style pad and you are holding a…
If you buy games on the Epic Games Store or GOG, you have probably noticed a gap that Steam users rarely think about: there is no controller remapping layer waiting to rescue a PlayStation pad. A DualShock 4 that a game ignores stays ignored. This guide covers the two practical routes for Epic and GOG…
Emulators reward patience in their settings menus, but controller setup does not have to be the hard part. If you play PlayStation 2 games through PCSX2 or PlayStation 3 games through RPCS3 and you want to use a DualShock 4 — the pad those games were designed around — the simplest path is to give…
A profile in InputMapper is a saved set of choices: which virtual device to output, how each button and stick behaves, and which macros ride along. The controller supplies raw input; the profile decides what that input becomes. That separation is InputMapper’s most useful idea, because one DualShock 4 can behave like a plain Xbox…
A macro turns one press into a sequence: several buttons in order, a keyboard shortcut, a mouse action, or a combination of them. In InputMapper, macros live inside a profile, so the same controller button can trigger a useful shortcut in one game and do nothing special in another. Used well, macros remove repetitive input…
A Bluetooth connection between a DualShock 4 and a Windows PC is simple in principle and fiddly in practice. The pairing itself takes under a minute, but stale pairings, an adapter fighting USB 3.0 interference, or a power-saving setting that puts the radio to sleep will make the same controller flawless on Monday and unusable…
InputMapper is a closed-source freeware utility from DSDCS that takes a real controller connected to your PC and presents it to games as a different, virtual controller. Its history runs from DS4Tool in 2014, through DS4Windows, to InputMapper in 2015. The final build is 1.7.7452.13622, built in May 2020 and sized at 72.2 MB, with…
Three groups of settings decide how a DualShock 4 actually feels in your hands through InputMapper: the lightbar, the rumble motors, and the analog stick dead zones. None of them changes what buttons do — that is profile mapping, covered in InputMapper profiles — but together they decide whether a long session is comfortable, whether…
The DualShock 4 touchpad is the feature Xbox controllers simply do not have, and on PC its best trick is pretending to be a mouse. With InputMapper, the touchpad on a DualShock 4 or DS4 V2 can move the Windows cursor, tap to click, and swipe to scroll, so you can launch games, dismiss dialogs,…
