RemoteJoy & Xpadder – An Epic Win

By Andrew Monkelban

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I love hackers. The Jargon File, a compendium of hacker slang, defines hacker as “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.” As far as video game hackers go, among other things, they explore games’ internal code, and create cheat codes for those games.

Now I’m not saying most of what they do isn’t helping cheating for cheating sake, but every once in a while, someone comes up with something that’s actually useful. The most recent of these useful findings resulted in the Guitar Grip code for Guitar Hero: On Tour, which enables you to play without the otherwise-required Guitar Grip and maps the string buttons to the DS’ face buttons. This specific code is particularly useful for disabled gamers such as myself, that only have use of one hand.

While not a code per se, there is something similar for the PSP. RemoteJoy is a homebrew application created by TyRaNiD, which lets you stream video output from your PSP to your computer, and lets you control it via your keyboard. It even lets you record gameplay. Using RemoteJoy in conjunction with Xpadder, you can control your PSP through your computer, using an USB controller. Xpadder is a program that has the ability to emulate a mouse and/or keyboard using a controller or joystick. It can be used with anything – media players, web browsers, flash games, you name it. Personally, I also use Xpadder to play World of Warcraft. (Thanks a LOT, Matt! I owe you!)

RemoteJoy isn’t perfect, however. Some games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories do not display properly, because of how the games’ graphics are generated. But that isn’t to say the RemoteJoy/Xpadder solution can’t be used with those games. You can use RemoteJoy so Xpadder works with the PSP, and use the controller while looking at your PSP. True, you could go and mod your PSP to do something like this, but RemoteJoy and Xpadder give you customization options. I’ll get to that in a minute, though.

The RemoteJoy/Xpadder solution is very useful for disabled gamers, as the distance between the d-pad and face buttons on the PSP Slim and Lite (PSP-2000) is approximately 6 inches, and approximately 6.25 inches on a PSP Phat (PSP-1000). I have a Logitech Dual Action USB controller, which looks like a Playstation 2 controller, and the d-pad and face buttons is approximately 4.20 inches. That’s about a 2-inch difference. However, RemoteJoy can also help regular gamers, such as people who just hate the PSP’s analog nub. In addition, with Xpadder, you can map any button to any part of the controller. Say you can’t reach the shoulder buttons. You can map them to left and right on the right analog stick. Xpadder also has built-in turbo functionality, which is useful for action titles like X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But, I digress.

The RemoteJoy/Xpadder solution is very helpful, and it wouldn’t have been created without hackers. Playing the game would have gone in a totally different direction before if you had given me a PSP with Dissidia: Final Fantasy in it, but since I discovered RemoteJoy and Xpadder, I can actually play the correct way and enjoy the game.

Below is my first time recording with RemoteJoy after playing with the codecs. Yeah, I know there’s no sound and for some reason, the title screen and character selection didn’t record… o_O Oh well. Not my best match, but I’m rusty, and the 360 controller doesn’t help things (I didn’t feel like digging my Logitech one out of my bag)…

Note: I’d also like to thank Brad Borne of Borne Games (Mirror’s Edge 2D; Fancy Pants Adventures) for letting me know programs like Xpadder even existed. He told me about JoyToKey, which emulates key strokes. So first came Brad, then Matt.