The analog plunger, analog nudge, and buttons are all implemented as a standard game controller in Windows:
This is the VirtuaPin Digital Plunger Kit v3. A few notes:
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The plunger is only “half” the Z axis for some reason
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The analog nudge is a tiny, tiny range around the center of the stick. It’s probably even a bit smaller than the box I drew above, but it does sense forward, back, and both sides.
I need to mess with it a bit more to get the Xbox 360 controller mappings set up because the half Z-axis is unusual, and the joystick “nudge” range is tiny. Granted you probably don’t need a ton of resolution for any of this, but the mapping is the tricky part.
Bear in mind the “Controller” defaults on Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX2 are fairly simple, so there’s not a whole lot to map:
Update: OK, got it – at least for the nudge and basic pinball controls, these are the x360ce mappings you want:
Pretty standard, some notes:
- button labeled start on the cabinet maps to (start) on the controller
- bottom square cabinet button maps to back button (B) on controller
- plunger launch cabinet button maps to (A)
- green cabinet button maps to (X)
The left stick is used for nudge so that’s where the joystick axis maps to, but you’ll need extreme tweaks:
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The sensitivity is inverted so it’s necessarily ultra sensitive because the x/y range of nudge axes is so tiny.
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There is a small dead zone to prevent normal play from causing nudges.
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The anti-dead zone is maxed, so once you hit any X/Y value outside the deadzone it registers as pushing the stick all the way in that direction. This makes it almost like a binary 1/0 instead of an analog nudge, but that’s what I found worked best.
I do get a nice nudge effect when I push the table now. Feels quite analog!
I haven’t been able to get the plunger working very well (would be right stick) because of the crazy half Z axis mapping. Also Pinball FX wants the right stick to do double duty as UI navigation, so it has to “center” otherwise crazy things happen in the game UI.
I’m not totally convinced a digital plunger is all that useful, anyway, since you can hold the button to emulate a partial pullback of the plunger very easily..