HidHide
Gaming Input Peripherals Device Firewall for Windows.
Introduction
Microsoft Windows offers support for a wide range of human interface devices, like joysticks and game pads.
Associating the buttons and axes of these devices with application specific behavior, such as Fire, Roll, or Pitch
is however left to the individual application developers to realize.
While there are good examples of applications allowing a user to customize the controls to their liking, other
applications are less sophisticated or lack just that feature a user is looking for. This is where utilities like vJoy
and Joystick Gremlin come to the rescue. These utilities aren't limited by a vendor lock-in and attempt to move
certain features back into the domain of the operating system. Once properly arranged, a feature becomes
universally available for a wide range of applications.
A technique used by these utilities is to use a feeder application that listens to the physical devices on a system,
and in turn controls one or more virtual devices where the game or application is listening to. Mapping physical
devices to a virtual device allows for e.g. dual joystick support in games that only support a single joystick, or
enable multiple devices to bind to the one and same function in a game that only supports single controller bindings.
While this approach offers a lot of advantages, it also comes with a side effect. Most applications record the user
interactions while binding a function with a control or button press. When a virtual device is used, the application
receives input from two devices simultaneously. It will be notified by both the physical device triggered, and the
virtual device that acts in turn! Some feeders have an option to spam the application repeatedly; however, that approach is
cumbersome and error prone.
With HidHide it is possible to deny a specific application access to one or more human interface devices, effectively
hiding a device from the application. When a HOTAS is preferred for a flight-simulator one can hide the game pads.
When a steering wheel is preferred for a racing game, one can hide the joysticks, and so on. When, as mentioned
above, a feeder utility is used, one can use to hide the physical device from the application, hence avoiding
multiple notifications while binding game functions and device controls.
