DS4Windows VS HidHide

And there was also a fork available in the last year while the original dev was on a hiatus.

Personally I use CircumSpector's DS4Windows. It has restored rumble and lightbar passthru on my end. The lightbar passthru is kinda buggy but it kinda works.

Thankfully, Jibb already redirects the newer fork if you look at the Release page or literally the first Paragraph of README.md. So unlike DS4Windows (which took 6-7+ years to tell folks to move over to Ryochan4 fork...which said fork been discontinued and someone else took over. Welcome to FOSS. 😋), it should be easy enough to head over to Electronicks fork.

Final note: DS4Windows hasn't been updated since August 2021. Another group forked it and they're rewriting a lot of it. There is no release yet and no release date planned.

A couple of FOSS enthusiasts and myself have taken over the decade old game controller remapping tool DS4Windows (https://github.com/CircumSpector/DS4Windows) with the goal to rewrite major parts using latest dotnet patterns and technologies. There's still months worth of work left but despite being an ambitious task, it's quite doable and fun figuring out your way around someone else's massive code base. Join us if you like!

The DS4Windows project is not dead. There is a new team working on it called CircumSpector, but it may take a while for a update to be released since they are focusing on "modernizing" the code so it's easier to maintain it in the future. There are lots of changes going on under the hood, but "user visible" changes for now.

This is not exactly true. Check CircumSpector's DS4Windows.

Basically, looks like IL-2 will only detect first 8 usb devices. I have about twice as that number in the simpit. One solution is to unplug stuff. That ain't happening over here - if I have to unplug stuff I might just as well hire a minimum wage worker for that. Another option is to use devreorder u/charon-prime suggested or temporarily hide the unneeded devices with HidHide.

DCS Scratchpad, Open Kneeboard, Joystick Gremlin and HidHide, VoiceAttack, Tacview, and if I may self-promote for a moment, DCS AutoMate.

HidHide https://github.com/ViGEm/HidHide/releases can hide devices in software. Just run the configuration client to either select the device and hide it on demand or always hide it from anything but the games in which you want to use it

I've been playing with using XOutput + HidHide to cause Windows to see the the ALP controls as an Xbox controller instead of the generic device it normally appears as, and it seemed to significantly improve the input latency in FX. But there are other downsides and quirks that it causes, including problems actually launching the ball in some of the FX tables, so it might also end up being a non-starter.

I use HIDHide, you can find it here: https://github.com/ViGEm/HidHide

This might work.