darkenedroom wrote on 2026-07-25, 13:26:

So another update : […]
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So another update :

The game doesn't use DirectInput but WinMM as the joystick mechanism. This was determined by using Xidi with the Hookshot injection mechanism, this reveals that WinMM is used as Xidi/Hookshot adds a winmm.dll wrapper and not a dinput.dll wrapper. Now the problem is that most winmm wrappers concentrate on the audio/midi side of things and not the joystick side (would be happy to be proved wrong in this conclusion).

The game seems to have a serious issue with DirectInput devices and basically fails to start if it can see any. However it can be made tolerant of a vJoy virtual joystick being present if not being used.

So using a combination of HidHide to hide physical DirectInput devices and leaving vJoy visible and Joystick Gremlin to map axes/buttons to the vJoy joystick and also using vJoy to create the virtual joystick you end up with a single visible vJoy virtual joystick. This combo would also allow you to use any vendor physical device and map excess buttons to keyboard key presses.

This is no good for iF-22v5 as it's still a DirectInput device, however you can use XOutput to create a virtual XInput device from the vJoy virtual joystick.

The final piece of the puzzle is using RetroBridge created by rkk which includes a winmm wrapper that deals with the joystick and midi/audio bits. The RetroBridge wrapper can creates another virtual joystick device with 2 axes, 4 buttons and a pov hat that communicates with the XOutput virtual XInput device.

So we have:

• Physical DirectInput devices (hidden by HidHide) mapped to a vJoy virtual DirectInput device.
• The vJoy virtual DirectInput device mapped to an XOutput virtual XInput device.
• RetroBridge winmm wrapper taking the virtual XInput device and mapping it to a virtual joystick device (2 axes, 4 buttons, pov hat) which works in iF-22v5.

Surprising this whole weird combo of stuff actually manages to work as shown by this YouTube vid.

Wow... what a revelation. As I suspected earlier about the DirectInput (especially via USB) is vehemently rejected by the game. And I hope someone could fix the black fine lines around the sun, flare and explosion.

Managed to get this running with full HOTAS controller support, stick, separate throttle and rudder pedals.
Quick demo video here (for proof): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz8cQ3Icae8

This is my guide for getting iF-22 running with full HOTAS support, stick, throttle and rudder pedals, using a combination of GremlinEx (branch of Joystick Gremlin), the ViGem Bus Driver and Xidi.
This is a supplemental guide covering the joystick/HOTAS setup so the original setup guide (linked in the below article should still be used):

iF-22: Windows is alright for controllers and flight