Keyboard & Mouse

Keyboard and Mouse to controller lets you play controller-only games with your keyboard and mouse. WASD drives the left stick, the mouse drives the aim stick, and any key becomes a button, trigger, or macro. Output runs through Emulation, so the game reads a genuine virtual pad rather than an injected input, and your keyboard and mouse control it directly.

Overview

Keyboard and Mouse maps your desk setup onto a virtual Xbox 360 or DualShock 4 pad. WASD reports as left-stick movement, mouse motion becomes the right (aim) stick, and every other input is free to assign as a face button, trigger, or macro. Because the pad is created by the ViGEmBus kernel driver at the same layer as a physical controller on USB, Windows and the game see a real device. Nothing touches the game process.

Mouse-to-stick aiming is the part that has to be modeled carefully. A mouse reports movement as deltas, while a stick reports a held position that keeps the camera turning until it recenters. Feed raw mouse motion straight to the stick and the camera drifts past where you pointed. OmniControl solves this with turn-match calibration: you line up a fixed landmark in-game, press F8 to start, turn exactly one full 360-degree circle with the mouse until the landmark lines up again, then press F8 to stop. From that single circle it locks your in-game turn rate so the aim stick tracks the mouse instead of drifting. F8 works from any focused window, and the result saves per game.

Why use it

Some games only accept a controller, or play better with one, but you prefer keyboard and mouse. This is the bridge. You keep the precision and muscle memory of a mouse for aim and WASD for movement, and the game receives a standard pad it fully supports.

Use cases

• Playing a controller-only or controller-first title on PC while keeping mouse aim and WASD movement.
• Using a familiar keyboard-and-mouse layout on a game whose controller support is stronger than its keyboard support.
• Setting up mouse-to-controller aim that tracks 1:1 up to your game's turn cap after a quick turn-match run.
• Building a per-game layout once, then having it auto-load through Profiles the next time you launch that game.

Supported devices and compatibility

Keyboard and Mouse does not require a physical controller at all, since it synthesizes the pad itself. The output is a virtual Xbox 360 pad (the default, with the widest Windows support) or a virtual DualShock 4 for games that read PlayStation input. Both are provided by ViGEmBus, a separate one-click install from the Drivers card in Settings. Pick whichever pad the game prefers as the output target.

For DPI, OmniControl cannot read the value from the mouse itself, because Windows exposes no reliable API for it. Instead it uses a drag wizard: you drag the mouse a known physical distance, for example 20 cm, and it counts the raw mouse counts to compute DPI. DPI is stored per mouse in Settings. Combined with your measured turn, it produces a real cm/360 figure, the standard FPS sensitivity unit measured in centimeters of mouse travel per full in-game turn.

Limitations

Keyboard movement is not identical to an analog stick. WASD is digital on/off, so holding W is always a full-forward stick with no half-press, and fine walk speeds and diagonal blends behave differently from a real thumbstick. Mouse aim is a model of an analog stick, so it can be tuned to feel right but is not the game's native raw-mouse path. The aim stick can also only turn as fast as the game lets a controller turn at full deflection. If your in-game controller sensitivity is low, fast flicks hit that cap and the mouse outruns the camera, which is why raising the game's controller sensitivity (often to maximum) is recommended. The honest promise is 1:1 up to your game's turn cap. Some titles, usually those with anti-cheat, detect or reject virtual controllers on purpose, and OmniControl does not circumvent that.

Tips and best practices

Measure DPI once, then run turn-match once per game and redo it whenever you change your in-game controller sensitivity. Set the game's controller sensitivity high so more of your mouse motion maps before the turn cap saturates. Enable Play Mode only after you have finished mapping and calibrating; toggle it off to return your keyboard and mouse to normal desktop use.

Works with the rest of OmniControl

Keyboard and Mouse drives a virtual pad through Emulation, which is a Pro capability, so the full play experience needs Pro. Free users can still configure and preview the entire setup, including mappings and calibration, and see it work once Emulation is running. Upgrading to Pro is a one-time purchase with no subscription. Your layout, turn-match, and Play Mode state save into Profiles so they follow each game automatically. For the full walkthrough, read the Keyboard and Mouse documentation.