PPSSPP is one of my favorite emulators. First introduced to me when I was still in high school, it is my go-to (or, only?) choice if I want to revisit some old PSP games. Though I ran into an issue that I was not able to run, only walk, diagonally in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, while using a controller on Android.
After some investigation I found out the root cause: PSP analog stick input uses max-norm (shown as p=∞ below), not Euclidean-norm (shown as p=2 below), which most other controller uses.
In a simpler sentence: When you draw a circle using a regular controller analog stick, you get a circular input; when you draw a circle using a PSP analog stick, you get a square.
Apparently, the Android controller backend in PPSSPP did not perform this circle to square conversion, thus causing this issue. This is evidenced in the GIF below, using the PPSSPP analog stick viewer.
Now, the easiest way of fixing this is to implement the circle to square mapping in the Android analog input backend, but that’s not the best solution. For historical reasons, the analog stick input is architected as the following
Analog stick mapping is done by each backend separately, with the XInput implementation being the more feature-complete one. The other ones usually have fewer features or are somewhat broken (e.g. lacking the necessary circle to square mapping). What we need is to refactor this into something more reasonable.
This ensures that no matter which input backend you are using, you use the same, unified input mapper implementation. This ensures feature parity across all input backends. We just need to implement a correct, feature-complete unified input mapper.
After a few hours, I have the refactor done, and it was eventually merged into master. The fix will most likely be available in the future 1.12 release of PPSSPP, and people can now have their game characters run diagonally.
