DualSense triggers sometimes will be hard with Virtual Xbox 360 Controller

[Jobima1st]

sometimes it will be stiff as soon I start PadForge, and sometimes it triggered if I run OBS after PadForge with the Input Overlay plugin (https://github.com/univrsal/input-overlay/releases)

and if you press the triggers, you will feel a vibration that resists the pressure!

padforge-trace.log

[Jobima1st]

Additional informations

switching to another profile seems fix it temporarily

and if I close PadForge without that temporarily fix, the triggers will keep stiff and vibration!

and I notice something else, it dont show any response here after that

[Jobima1st]

and I notice something else, it dont show any response here after that

seems that another issue, and only with the Bluetooth
and it make this window crash

and again, to avoid confusion, these has nothing to do with the hard triggers

[hifihedgehog]

Thanks for the log. Here is where the analysis stands.

What the log shows. Your DualSense is connected over Bluetooth and assigned to a slot set to Virtual Xbox 360 Controller. The log covers about 90 seconds, and in it you switch profiles twice. Each switch passes through a PlayStation-type profile and back, and on the way back PadForge writes a "release triggers" command to the pad. That command is what clears the stiff triggers, which is why switching profiles fixes it for a while. Nothing in the log shows what set the triggers in the first place, because PadForge does not log that yet.

What we ruled out. A Virtual Xbox 360 Controller has no trigger motors, and we checked every path a game or another program could use to reach it. None of them can carry a trigger value into PadForge, so a game is not the source.

What is left. Two things can still drive the adaptive triggers while a DualSense sits on an Xbox 360 slot:

1. A setting in your PadForge profile. Adaptive Triggers on the DualSense tab, Trigger Routing, Constant Trigger Force, a macro with trigger rumble, or Rumble from audio combined with Trigger Routing would each do it. The last one comes and goes with whatever audio is playing, which would explain "sometimes".
2. Another program writing to the DualSense directly. That can only happen if the pad is visible to other programs. Steam is the most common one, since Steam Input sets DualSense trigger effects on its own.

What I need from you.

1. Attach your PadForge.xml. It sits in the same folder as PadForge.exe.
2. On the Devices page, is "Hide from Games (HidHide)" switched on for the DualSense? And is the HidHide driver installed?
3. Is Steam, DS4Windows, DualSenseX, or any other controller program running at the same time?
4. When you open OBS, does the DualSense lightbar change colour?

The Game Controllers window behaviour is a separate matter. That window reads the controller's basic report layout, and once PadForge has switched a Bluetooth DualSense into its full report mode, the window stops receiving updates. The crash is inside that Windows window, not PadForge.

[Jobima1st]

1. PadForge.xml
2. yes for both
3. steam only
4. no

[Jobima1st]

and I just tried without steam and still same, and I forget to mention that I didnt use any game, the stiff happen without run any game while I in windows, also fresh PadForge with only Virtual Xbox 360 Controller will get the same problem

[hifihedgehog]

Thanks. Your PadForge settings are clean: trigger modes are Off in both profiles, no trigger routing, no constant force, no audio rumble, and the DualSense is hidden. Nothing in PadForge is set to drive those triggers.

Your device list has eight FakerInput devices, last seen today. FakerInput is the driver DS4Windows installs. DS4Windows adds itself to HidHide's allow list, so it can still reach the DualSense while everything else is hidden, and its profiles can set a trigger effect (Rigid, Full Click, Pulse). It also switches profiles by foreground program, which fits "it starts when I open OBS", and it usually runs in the tray from Windows startup.

Is DS4Windows installed, and is it running or set to start with Windows? If it is, that is the writer, and it needs to be closed or its DualSense support turned off while PadForge owns the pad.

[Jobima1st]

DS4Windows

I had it portable, and not set to start with Windows, I will try after removing FakerInput

[Jobima1st]

ok, both ViGEmBus and FakerInput removed, and now it only happen with obs and Input Overlay plugin, and as soon I close obs it back to normal

and perhaps it's related, Sonic UltraSaturn (free fan game) fps will be so low after I use PadForge (even after I close it!) until I restart the windows

[Jobima1st]

and perhaps it's related, Sonic UltraSaturn (free fan game) fps will be so low after I use PadForge (even after I close it!) until I restart the windows

another additional informations

this can be fixed without restart the windows, simply by reopen PadForge without connecting my DualSense, this fix the low fps that happen either after DS4Windows or PadForge

[Jobima1st]

btw, is there some way to uninstall HIDMaestro just in case to get clean start?

[Jobima1st]

I think my windows is ruined, I did install ViGEmBus again, and did try with DS4Windows and the same so low fps in Sonic UltraSaturn problem happen!

I dont remember having problem with Sonic UltraSaturn and DS4Windows (Virtual Xbox 360 Controller using DualSense)

Unfortunately I dont have a system restore point to before I use PadForge so I cant check, I did try uninstall that USBip (which is I found on my computer after using PadForge, even though you didn't mention it anywhere in PadForge and its documentation!) and still the same problem!

I tried what I had available, which was a budget win10 laptop with a 7th generation Intel processor and an older version of DS4Windows installed from 2022, and the low frame rate issue did not occur!

so either PadForge has corrupted the windows or it some Microslop win11 BS!

[Trihy]

USBip is part of HidMaestro which is part of padforge and it´s needed for proper dualsense emulation. VigemBus is a bsod factory right now. It shouldnt be installed anymore. If you need to use DS4W for some reason, just look for a fork without VigemBus.

Dont think padforge can corrupt Windows like VigemBus can, since it´s a kernel mode driver. Try other builds of padforge and delete the .xml if you wan to start clean.

[Jobima1st]

Thanks for the clarification. I also thought it was related to what you mentioned, but I couldn't find it written anywhere.

I did use Ryochan7 DS4Windows until I did update it to schmaldeo's days before I switched to use PadForge

I know there are DS4Windows fork of hbashton but I skip it since it still under development, and I did saw that PadForge is a better choice

[Jobima1st]

Try other builds of padforge and delete the .xml if you wan to start clean.

will that remove HidMaestro? from https://padforge.org/docs/features/driver-management/#uninstall seems HidMaestro cant be removed without reformating and reinstall the windows! which I dont want do do (a lengthy process involving the loss of settings in many programs, plus new problems thanks to Microslop)

[hifihedgehog]

@Trihy, a few corrections so nobody acts on them.

USB/IP. Half right. usbip-win2 is bundled inside HIDMaestro, and it is there for one thing: a virtual DualSense's audio, microphone, and haptics are USB audio endpoints, and Windows only creates those for a real device on the USB bus. It installs itself the first time a PlayStation slot is created. A Virtual Xbox 360 Controller never touches it.

ViGEmBus. It is not a BSOD factory and there is no reason to tell people to remove it. It is a signed driver that has run under DS4Windows and dozens of other tools for years on an enormous number of machines. A blue screen with any kernel driver points at a conflict on that machine (another filter driver in the same stack, a half-removed older install), not at the driver as a class. PadForge stopped depending on it because HIDMaestro replaced it, which is a different statement from "it should not be installed anymore." Anyone whose other tools need ViGEmBus should keep it.

"Kernel mode driver corrupts Windows." HIDMaestro and usbip-win2 are kernel-mode drivers too, as is every virtual controller solution on Windows, ViGEmBus included. None of them corrupts Windows in a way that needs a reinstall.

Other builds. The current release is the one to stay on. Deleting PadForge.xml resets settings, never drivers, and nothing in this thread points at a build.

[Jobima1st]

I think I am lost in this weirdness! I find another fix for the low fps of Sonic UltraSaturn #350 (reply in thread)

another weird thing, the stiff still only happen with obs even after reinstall ViGEmBus and FakerInput, edit: but seems it wont back to normal after closing obs!

[hifihedgehog]

@Jobima1st, your Windows is not ruined, and nothing here needs a reinstall.

The triggers. The adaptive triggers live in the physical DualSense, and the only way they change is a program writing to the pad itself. Removing DS4Windows took away one such writer, which is why the "sometimes" cases stopped. What is left is OBS with Input Overlay, and that plugin reads controllers through SDL2, which opens a DualSense directly when it can see one. HidHide should be stopping that unless OBS is on its allow list. Please check:

1. Open the HidHide Configuration Client, Applications tab. Is obs64.exe (or anything in the OBS folder) listed? If yes, remove it, restart OBS, and see whether the triggers still change.
2. If it is not listed: in OBS, remove the gamepad source from Input Overlay (keep OBS open), and see whether the triggers still change.
3. Tell me the result of both.

usbip-win2. It arrived with a PlayStation slot. Your log shows profile switches passing through a PlayStation profile, and the first time such a slot exists, HIDMaestro installs its bundled USB transport for the virtual DualSense's audio and haptics. It is a signed, BSD-licensed driver and it has nothing to do with a Virtual Xbox 360 Controller or with the triggers.

The low frame rate in Sonic UltraSaturn. You saw the same thing after DS4Windows, and reopening PadForge without the pad cleared it. Both point at the pad being visible to the game, not at either program. A DualSense over Bluetooth that a program has switched into its full report mode keeps sending that report after the program closes, and some games poll it badly. One test settles it:

1. Restart Windows. Do not start PadForge.
2. Connect the DualSense over Bluetooth and start the game. Note the frame rate.
3. Start PadForge, close it, start the game again. Note the frame rate.

If step 2 is already slow, PadForge is not involved at all. If only step 3 is slow, tell me and I will look at what the pad is left in when PadForge exits.

If you want a clean PadForge start at any point, close PadForge and rename PadForge.xml (it sits beside PadForge.exe). That resets every setting and keeps the old file for you.

[Trihy]

Sure, no problem. Been working with vigembus and there are hundreds of report of bsod caused by vigem on ds4w. There are many alternatives now. Is up to the user what to use. Just sharing what I see everyday.

Could be obs or other app triggering some padforge profile?

[hifihedgehog]

@Trihy, fair enough on what you see day to day, and thanks for taking the correction well.

To answer your question, since it is a good one: no, a profile switch cannot be doing it here. PadForge does switch profiles by foreground program when that setting is on, so the shape of your guess is right. What rules it out is the contents of the file. Both profiles in Jobima1st's PadForge.xml have trigger modes set to Off, no trigger routing, and no audio rumble, so whichever profile is active, none of them carries a trigger effect to send.

The writer is a program holding the pad open directly. OBS with the Input Overlay plugin was confirmed by disabling the plugin, and the same mechanism covers the others.

[Jobima1st]

The low frame rate in Sonic UltraSaturn. You saw the same thing after DS4Windows, and reopening PadForge without the pad cleared it. Both point at the pad being visible to the game, not at either program. A DualSense over Bluetooth that a program has switched into its full report mode keeps sending that report after the program closes, and some games poll it badly. One test settles it:

1. Restart Windows. Do not start PadForge.

2. Connect the DualSense over Bluetooth and start the game. Note the frame rate.

3. Start PadForge, close it, start the game again. Note the frame rate.

If step 2 is already slow, PadForge is not involved at all. If only step 3 is slow, tell me and I will look at what the pad is left in when PadForge exits.

step 2 start slow then after few seconds it get to the full speed (same as my old laptop), and if I close the game and restart it it will be in full fps

after step 3 the fps will be forever low (unless I do the fixes I mentioned before)

The triggers. The adaptive triggers live in the physical DualSense, and the only way they change is a program writing to the pad itself. Removing DS4Windows took away one such writer, which is why the "sometimes" cases stopped. What is left is OBS with Input Overlay, and that plugin reads controllers through SDL2, which opens a DualSense directly when it can see one. HidHide should be stopping that unless OBS is on its allow list. Please check:

1. Open the HidHide Configuration Client, Applications tab. Is `obs64.exe` (or anything in the OBS folder) listed? If yes, remove it, restart OBS, and see whether the triggers still change.

2. If it is not listed: in OBS, remove the gamepad source from Input Overlay (keep OBS open), and see whether the triggers still change.

3. Tell me the result of both.

I did setup a portable obs https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-and-obs-studio-portable-mode-on-windows.359/ with only https://github.com/univrsal/input-overlay/releases

1. no, it's not in the list
2. with the fresh portable obs it dont have anything, I didnt even change anything in the settings, but I did try with disabling the plugin in obs plugin manger and the stiff is gone after restarting obs with the plugin disabled

and yet another additional information, with Virtual Xbox 360 Controller I can hear triggers sound (either with or without stiff cases) as soon as I open PadForge (that didnt happen if the last Virtual Controller I use was DualSense before I close PadForge)

[Jobima1st]

is it normal to get this

after open USBip? when I first use PadForge more than a week or two ago it was open fine, did I corrupt it since I remove it today (PadForge reinstall it again but now it give this error)

[Jobima1st]

fix it,
first thing first, I did set back the temp to default rather than ramdisk with AIM Toolkit
then I restart

then I did remove USBip restart and then remove hidhide and restart and then removed any unknown device from device manger and then restart

then I launched PadForge and install both USBip and hidhide, USBip work now

[Jobima1st]

USBip work now

and the low fps is fixed now with Virtual DualSense by DualSense

[Jobima1st]

the Virtual Xbox 360 Controller problems still more or less the same, Including the low fps of Sonic UltraSaturn

[Jobima1st]

more info about Virtual Xbox 360 Controller problems

the good news, after the cleanup fix I did above to fix USBip, the click that happen when I start PadForge seems gone

but seems I find another thing that make it stiff (and click) which is open LibreWolf!

[hifihedgehog]

@Jobima1st, I think this thread has an answer, and it is not the one we have been chasing.

The cause is the optimizer software on your machine

You have a system optimizer suite that redirected %TEMP% to a RAM disk. Windows stages driver installation through %TEMP%. That single change is enough to break driver installs, and you demonstrated it yourself: you set %TEMP% back to the default, and usbip-win2 installed correctly on the next try.

Alongside that, devices were deleted from Device Manager by hand, and drivers were removed and reinstalled repeatedly over one day.

Driver installation and device enumeration are precisely what a virtual controller depends on. A machine where those two things have been rearranged by tools that promise to make Windows faster is a machine where the same test gives a different answer each day, which is exactly what this thread has recorded.

These programs do not make Windows faster. Relocating system folders, deleting devices, and pruning services trade a benchmark number that nobody feels for a driver stack that no longer behaves predictably. Your own comparison is the proof, and it is the most useful thing in this thread: a budget Windows 10 laptop with none of it applied, running an old build of DS4Windows, with none of these problems.

The frame rate in Sonic UltraSaturn belongs here too. PadForge's performance floor is an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 stick PC with eMMC storage, the weakest machine this project validates against, and a Virtual Xbox 360 slot runs fine on it. A Ryzen 5600X is not short of headroom. A frame rate that collapses and then stays collapsed after the program has exited is not a cost PadForge is imposing.

The triggers are the one separate thing, and they are already answered

A program that has your DualSense open and speaks its output reports can set the adaptive triggers. DS4Windows did it. OBS with Input Overlay does it, and you confirmed that by disabling the plugin. LibreWolf is the same mechanism again.

HidHide cannot prevent this, and that is worth knowing because it will save you time. HidHide filters device opens that happen after the cloak goes up. It cannot revoke a handle a program already holds. So "obs64.exe is not in the allow list" and "OBS is still reaching the pad" are both true at once.

Any other program that opens the DualSense directly will behave the same way. Finding a fifth one will not change the answer.

For completeness, since it comes up: your PadForge.xml has trigger modes Off in both profiles, no trigger routing, no constant force, and no audio rumble, and a Virtual Xbox 360 Controller has no trigger motors. Nothing in PadForge is writing to those triggers.

What I would do

Undo the optimizer suite's changes, leave %TEMP% where Windows puts it, install the drivers once, and leave them alone. Then run PadForge without OBS and see what is actually left.

I am glad to help on that footing. What I am not going to do is keep diagnosing a driver stack that third-party optimizer software is rearranging, because no result from it can be trusted to mean what it appears to mean, including a result that appears to clear PadForge.

[Jobima1st]

I didnt use any tool to speed up Windows, the ramdisk is to protect the SSD from unnecessary writes of the temp files, and as I said I did revert it, the laptop also had older version of ramdisk and the temp files set to the ramdisk since years!

anyway, my problem now is Virtual Xbox 360 Controller, I will try with Virtual xbox one Controller and see if it gone, and I didnt use DS4Windows at the same time with PadForge, only obs and others

[Jobima1st]

with

there are no stiff or click, but sonic still slow, it's slow in any case other than Virtual DualSense by DualSense, even Virtual DS4 Controller is slow (BTW the game seems dont supports DualSense, buttons dont do anything inside the game so maybe that why), maybe it's microslop after all or a bug in the game, I dont know since seems it the only game that have this problem

anyway, now, why only Virtual Xbox 360 Controller has stiff problem?!

[Jobima1st]

with real xbox one Controller I borrowed from my brother, it start slow then after few seconds it get to the full speed (same as the laptop case), and I can control the game

so now what is the problem? microsoft update that affect Virtual Controllers? or the game is buggy?

[Jobima1st]

I can confirm all these problems on a friend's laptop, a laptop with no modifications in windows 11 at all! the slowness and stiffness issues are present.

so you can try and see yourself (you only need to download (everything is free) and extract and run)

[hifihedgehog]

@Jobima1st Found it, fixed it, and you were right that it was not your machine. Your "why only Virtual Xbox 360?!" question was the key, and the answer is a PadForge bug on exactly that lane. Thank you for narrowing it that far.

What was happening

Two defects stacked:

1. The Virtual Xbox 360 slot misread vibration commands. The Xbox 360 vibration message is five bytes, and its last byte is a flags byte, not motor data. PadForge treated longer buffers as carrying "trigger motor" values in that position, so when a program on your system sent vibration through a stack that pads the message, the flags byte was read as a tiny trigger-rumble value. PadForge then faithfully converted that phantom value into a DualSense adaptive-trigger vibration effect. That is the stiffness and the "vibration that resists the pressure": a real effect, engaged by a misread byte. Only Virtual Xbox 360 slots use this message path, which is why Virtual Xbox One was clean. OBS with Input Overlay and LibreWolf both enumerate and initialize gamepads through the modern Windows input stack, which is what sent those writes, and why a clean Windows 11 laptop reproduces it while an old Windows 10 machine does not.

2. The effect then stuck. With your trigger settings Off, PadForge deliberately leaves the trigger state untouched so another program's effect is not stomped. That same politeness preserved the stale effect across PadForge restarts and pad reconnects, which is why closing PadForge did not help and why switching profiles (which sends a release) fixed it temporarily. The lightbar already got a connect-time release for exactly this class of problem. The triggers now get the same one: when your DualSense connects and your trigger settings are Off, PadForge sends one release so nothing stale survives.

Both fixes are in the next build, along with permanent logging of every vibration command's exact bytes, so if anything in this family ever shows up again, the log names the sender immediately.

The Sonic UltraSaturn frame rate

That one is not PadForge's, and your own DsHidMini link points at the right suspect: the Windows GameInput service polling virtual HID gamepads badly, a known Windows 11 issue affecting several virtual-controller tools. Your data fits it exactly: a real Xbox controller is fine, the Virtual DualSense path is fine, and it is one game. Nothing in PadForge runs after PadForge exits, so a frame rate that stays low after closing it cannot be PadForge's process doing the work.

One correction to my earlier analysis: it blamed your system tools for more of this than they deserved. The temp-folder redirect genuinely did break the usbip driver install, and putting it back fixed that, but the triggers were ours. The "only Xbox 360" observation and the clean-laptop repro are what cracked it, so thanks for the persistence.

[Jobima1st]

thanks you so much! the stiff problem is fixed now!