What is steamlesscontroller?

This is a small Windows background application that lets you use a Steam Controller as a regular gamepad in any game, without needing Steam to be running. Normally, when Steam is closed, the Steam Controller switches into what the firmware calls lizard mode, which makes it emulate a keyboard and mouse rather than behaving like a standard game controller. That makes it incompatible with games that expect a conventional gamepad input. SteamlessController solves this by sitting in the Windows system tray, sending commands to the controller to disable lizard mode, and then translating the controller's raw input into a virtual Xbox 360 controller using a driver called ViGEmBus. ViGEmBus is a third party Windows driver that creates a virtual gamepad the operating system sees as a real Xbox controller, so any game that supports XInput, the standard Xbox controller interface, will work. A background process resends the disable command every 800 milliseconds to make sure lizard mode stays off. Extra features include using the right or left trackpad as a mouse cursor, mapping the back paddle buttons to mouse clicks, and a left handed mode that mirrors all controls to the left side. Settings are saved across restarts, the app guards against running more than one instance at a time, and it can be set to launch automatically at Windows startup. The project also ships two diagnostic command line tools for developers researching the controller's protocol: one dumps raw HID report bytes as you interact with the controller, and another checks whether Windows can enumerate the controller through its native gaming input APIs. You would use this if you own a Steam Controller and want to play non-Steam games with it. It requires Windows 10 or later, the ViGEmBus driver installed, and Steam must be closed while it runs. Building from source needs Visual Studio 2022 with the C++ workload and CMake.