- A program to help make computer games more accessible
- Copyright 2013-2022 Tim Brogden
- https://altcontroller.net
Alt Controller is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Alt Controller is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Alt Controller. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Alt Controller uses some free icons from the "Silk icon set 1.3" by Mark James. The icons are available at http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/ and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/).
The installer was packaged using NSIS (see http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page).
Alt Controller is designed to run on Windows computers. The software requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile. The installer will install this for you if you don't have it already.
The program is reasonably processor and memory intensive, so you might struggle if you have a very old computer.
To learn how to use Alt Controller, please see the online help on the website. To install Alt Controller, download and run the latest installer program (e.g. AltControllerSetup-....exe) and follow the instructions in the install wizard.
To start Alt Controller, double-click the shortcut on your desktop or choose Alt Controller from the Start menu. Alt Controller comes with some sample profiles. To try one of them, use File -> Open. More profiles can be downloaded from the Profiles page on the website.
Some games are designed to only accept "Raw" input i.e. input from physical devices. These games will not detect key presses or clicks generated by Alt Controller (nor from other keyboard and mouse emulation programs, most probably).
Alt Controller usually cannot draw screen region or mouse indicator overlays on top of games when they are running in full screen mode. This problem is not unique to Alt Controller. However, some games have an option to run inside a window, which may allow the overlays to be visible.
Alt Controller may not detect key presses that were generated using some onscreen keyboards.
Certain Windows scaling (DPI) settings can cause Alt Controller to interpret screen coordinates incorrectly. A helpful user has reported this solution to the problem: right-click the Alt Controller shortcut, choose Properties (Compatibility tab), click “Change High DPI settings” then tick “Override high DPI scaling performed by” and select “System”. Click OK twice to apply the changes.
The source code for Alt Controller is available at https://github.com/Tim-Brogden/AltController.
Alt Controller is a Microsoft .NET WPF application which can be built using Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019.
In order to build the installer, there is a script CreateAltControllerSetup.bat in the AltControllerSetup folder. It uses NSIS to package the Setup.exe and MSI files into a single installable exe file. The script isn't called from within the Visual Studio build process; it is run manually after building the solution. If you want run the script, you must first install NSIS, which is available from http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page).
The Change pointer action type will likely be removed in a coming version of the software. This was an experimental action type which now seems to serve no purpose. If you are using this action type, please let me know.
Future plans for the software include gradually improving the website and sharing user-created profiles and information there. If you have created a useful Alt Controller profile that you are willing to share, feel free to send it to me via the contact page at altcontroller.net.