ares is mixing up controllers in MacOS

[jeremiahrose]

In ares 141 on MacOS 14.6,

When I have two Xbox wireless controllers connected to the Mac (and working fine in other applications), and I map the first controller to port 1 and the other to port 2, ares seems to confuse these controllers with each other, e.g:

• Closing ares and restarting it sometimes results in the controllers being switched
• The controller that was previously binded as player one (in a single player game) stops working, when I reach for the other controller that one has become player one.
• The binding that's set in the settings is sometimes not obeyed by a running game, e.g if I bind a button on controller 1, the will only receive the button press from controller 2.

[Sintendo]

Issue is we're not calling setPathID in the IOKit implementation: https://github.com/ares-emulator/ares/blame/master/ruby/input/joypad/iokit.cpp#L204

As a result, we distinguish controllers only by vendor and product ID, which will be the same if you use identical controllers.

The question is: where do we get a value that can uniquely identify a controller on macOS? On Windows we use a hash of the USB device path, not sure if there's something similar to use on macOS.

[jcm93]

Irrespective of the above issue, I would definitely not recommend using the IOKit input driver; I have considered trying to deprecate/remove it. For controllers it's particularly unsuitable; there is no normalization of stick input or any standard features of a "modern" controller driver. It's more an API designed to write controller drivers with rather than a controller driver itself.

Can you confirm that you are in fact using the IOKit input driver, and if so, check if the same thing occurs using SDL for input?