A small, standalone Windows tool that makes any SDL3-compatible controller (Steam Controller, DualSense, Switch Pro, etc.) act like a standard Xbox 360 controller system-wide.
A lot of controllers don't work well outside of Steam because they lack native XInput support. SDL2XInput solves this. It reads your physical controller and creates a virtual Xbox 360 controller directly at the Windows driver level.
It can also act as a virtual mouse and keyboard, letting you map buttons to keys or use your controller's touchpad and gyro to move the cursor.
- No bloat: Doesn't require Steam or background servers.
- No ViGEmBus: Uses native Windows drivers via USBIP.
- Mouse & Keyboard: Map any controller button to a keyboard key or mouse click.
- Touchpad & Gyro: Full support for using them as a mouse.
- Rumble: Haptic feedback passes through perfectly (for supported controllers).
- Customizable: Swap buttons, tweak deadzones, and invert axes via a simple config file.
The only thing you need to install is the usbip-win2 driver. This is what allows the app to spawn the virtual controllers.
- Install usbip-win2.
- Download
sdl2xinput.exe(or build it yourself). - Double-click the
.exe.
That's it. It will sit in your system tray and do its thing. To close it, just right-click the tray icon. Logs are saved to sdl2xinput.log if you need to troubleshoot.
If you want to change button mappings, tweak mouse sensitivity, or map buttons to keyboard keys, create a config.toml next to the .exe.
Here is a quick example:
[buttons]
# Swap A and B (Nintendo style)
south = "b"
east = "a"
[mouse]
enabled = true
sensitivity = 1.5
[mapping]
# Make the Guide button press 'Escape' on your keyboard
guide = "Escape"
# Hold a back paddle to turn on gyro aiming
left_paddle1 = "gyro"For more advanced options (polling rates, device filtering, deadzones), run sdl2xinput.exe --help from your terminal.
Windows will now see two controllers: your real one, and the virtual Xbox 360 one. Some games will read both at the same time, causing double inputs.
The fix: Install HidHide and set it up to hide your real controller from everything except sdl2xinput.exe.
If you want to compile the project yourself, you'll need:
- Rust & Cargo
- Go (for the embedded VIIPER components)
- GCC Toolchain (MinGW-w64 on Windows)
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/VladFlorinIlie/sdl2xinput.git
cd sdl2xinput
cargo build --releaseThis project wouldn't exist without InputFusion (for the mapping logic) and SISR / VIIPER (for the virtual USB driver approach).
This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). See the LICENSE file for more details.