Adaptiod Drivers?

To write your own drivers you'll need to know C++ and have some sort of knowledge of the adapter. It's probably not worth the hassle.

Anyway, if it doesn't work can't you just send it back and get a refund?

D'oh

you should send it back ASAP, more likely the Hardware is broken

Adaptoid drivers will work only with the Adaptoid, and nothing else. And you will not be able to write your own drivers without knowing lotsa coding and having all the info on the hardware.....

they are not bullshiting, the n64 controller interface is complicated. but still, selling something that doesn't completely work is ahem bad.

Yeah the N64 controller interface sure is complicated. That's why the Adapotid is so damn expensive.
Worth every cent though.

You certainly won't be able to use Adaptoid drivers with anything but an Adaptoid. Hardware drivers in general are (for obvious reasons) written very low-level adapoted precisely to the hardware. Driver swapping might only work if the original and target hardware are extremly similar and share most if not all interfaces. E.g. you can install a Voodoo4/5 driver for a Voodoo3 since they share so many features. Of course functionality is lost (it is still a Voodoo3 and can't do 32bit or high texture resolutions etc.) but it's obviously good enough that people use them.
But I doubt the Adaptoid shares anything with all the other el-cheapo Combo-Adapters.

If it was so easy to get Adaptoid like quality everyone would buy some cheap adapter and use wishtech's drivers.
But btw. since the Adaptoid is recognized by USB as a real HID (Human Interface Device) it doesn't really need any special drivers for operation unless you want to leverage the rumblepack, mempack or other various controllerpak features.

But still I would assume that even those cheap N64/PSX combo adapters work somewhat. Probably not very good and losing functionality (e.g. no rumblepack support) and or precision. But it should at least recognize "something" or otherwise they couldn't market them as a N64 controller adapters now could they?

kristof said:

"Corak" i have yet another question about this for you. If the adaptoid is USB and classified as a HID, using its drivers for another adaptor that is also USB and classified as a HID, shouldn't it (theoretically) work because USB as the name states Universal. I know that drivers are written specifically for hardware but with this theory I just made, could it be possible to extract some sort of coding out of the adaptoid drivers and insert them into the other adaptor's drivers. ????

Click to expand...

Ok I guess I should elaborate this a little bit further. I'm no specific USB expert but this doesn't seem too overly complicated so I'm just doing an educated guess here which should be pretty reasonable hopefully.
Someone please tell me if I'm wrong and I'll read up some of the official USB specs.

Yes USB does stand for "Universal Serial Bus" meaning it should be able to handle pretty much any device. The beauty about USB is it's Plug'n'Play capability. The moment you plug-in an USB device into your USB port the USB system will query this new device for information. There are basically 2 possible outcomes for this query:

A) The device tells the USB system it's an HID device and supports this standard fully. Of course to be flexible additional queries should be in place. The USB system will need to query the device for even more details. Like how many buttons do you have? Which types? etc.
Then USB just uses it's native HID interfaces to talk to the device. But the adapter can't just act like a pass-through cable!

Because the complexity of an adapter like this lies herein:
The N64-Controller always "thinks" it's connected to a real N64. The controller has it's own properitary Nintendo64 interfaces / signaling and only understands these. The N64-controller certainly doesn't know USB at all. The adapter will have to translate all the communication from and to the controller between the USB and the N64-controller languages. This is the tough part where the electronic in the Adaptoid comes into play!
Of course all of this gets the more complicated the bigger the differences. I too would like to read up more on the N64-controller's complexity myself.

However even here Wishtech needs to have some driver for the RumblePack, MemPack, VoicePack, WhateverPack because USB HID doesn't provide the proper interfaces for this. It has to be "extended" by new drivers. Either that or it was too hard to do for Wishtech. In theory Rumbling and VoiceInput should be supported by HID. I see that saving on an Human Interface Device however is not a normal thing to do so it's probably not supported by USB HID natively.

B) The device tells the USB system it doesn't comply with any of the standard USB interface classes (such as HID) so it requires it's own drivers. (Or the device doesn't give any response so the USB system safely assumes this is the case) This is the moment where a driver dialog window should pop up asking for drivers matching the interfaces of this device. These drivers come with their own properitary interfaces and they handle all the talking to the device.

So to summarize the native USB HID drivers are all that are needed to get the Adaptoid to work with the exception of the Addon-ControllerPacks. So the main drivers/interfaces seen by Windows (the controller should still just see a standard N64) were not written by Wishtech but by the company which developed USB.
Wishtech "just" had to make sure the Adaptoid understands and supports the standard HID interface.

So to leverage these native USB drivers you would have to get USB to believe your N64/PSX2 combo adapter really does comply to the USB HID standard. Only then USB will try to talk to the device using this interface. Maybe there is some hack to force USB to talk to a specific device using some specified native interface class or maybe you could solder some new chip in between which just tells USB the following device is an USB HID device.
Of course all the effort would be totally useless because even if USB talks to your comboadapter using it's native HID interface nothing will improve. Rather the contrary. The comboadapter certainly doesn't comply to the native HID interface so all communication will fail and even less will work than before.
Maybe your adapter is able to talk to the controller properly but with this "hack" it certainly won't be able to pass anything on to the PC anymore.

If your other adapter was a real HID device (which it isn't) you wouldn't have all these troubles. But of course even if it was it could still suck. I could certainly imagine a N64 controller adapter which does fully comply to the USB HID interface but with shitty electronic so the analog inputs are parsed not exactly etc. Or maybe it doesn't report all buttons to USB etc.

And even if your other adapter was a real HID device Wishtechs drivers would be of no use since they again use their own propertitary interfaces only understood by the Adaptoid itself. But from my understanding support for ControllerPacks isn't your highest priority anyway now is it?

I hope the above makes little sense and helps a bit clearing things up.

So you have 3 real options to proceed:
I. Live with your comboadapter and it's flaws and hope for future driver updates
II. Get rid of your comboadapter and get a real N64->USB adapter like the Adaptoid.
III. Build your own adapter (DIY)

I would go for II. if I were you. But yeah I already did about 3 days ago.

Lol that XINGA's FAQ is hilarious. 4 out of 5 FAQ responses just point to the drivers page without any explanation whatsoever if these driver do fix anything or not.
Funny quote: "BUT for the N64 joypad, isn't ALL joypad can working steady since the structure of N64 joypad is very complex, so we can't 100% guarantee your N64 joypad can 100% work. You have to think over it before you decide to buy this device."
The Adaptoid doesn't seem to have any issues handling this complex device at all luckily.
:inlove:
But then again I paid more for the Adaptoid than for the controller. :blush:

Corak,

Good summary of USB/HID devices! You're right, you shouldn't need any special drivers to get a USB HID device to work.

About the PSX and N64/PSX combo adapters you see out there, almost all of them are copies of Simon Nield's design he created as a hobby back in 1999. He admits the N64 polling in his firmware wasn't very reliable. Check out http://www.stndev.btinternet.co.uk/usbpads.htm for his design info. Any USB adapter with a VID/PID of 6666/6667 is using his firmware. The "driver" that comes with these devices is a text INF file which just puts a fancy name in device manager, that's it. It's pretty amusing they offer it as a "driver", when it really does nothing at all.

The Adaptoid uses a different method of reading the N64 controller. We worked hard to come up with an algorithm which can read it reliably without creating spurious button presses and stick movements. This is all in the firmware inside the Adaptoid itself, so it works rock solid as a standard HID device.

All the other features such as rumble, mempacks, etc are a bonus and are mostly implemented in the driver we provide. The Adaptoid has some special code in the firmware to support these features, so you can't just load our driver on someone else's adapter and expect them to work.

Yes, there are now standards such as PID and USB Storage class so the force feedback and mempack stuff could theoretically be implemented entirely in the firmware of the device. We didn't do it that way because (1) these standards didn't exist back in 1998 when the Adaptoid was designed, (2) its much easier to put that stuff in a driver than in the firmware, and (3) a driver was needed for the keyboard/mouse mapping support anyway.

We put so much technology into the Adaptoid, most people probably don't use half of the features it has. But for those who dig into it and have a bit of programming skills, the Adaptoid is probably the most configurable and useful gamepad available on the PC.

Wow, a real wishtech representative in our boards

/feels special

wishtech said:

We put so much technology into the Adaptoid, most people probably don't use half of the features it has.

Click to expand...

Correct
I use just the standard rumble/mempack functions, never tried the scripting stuff.

:bunny: