Tools

Parsec

First of all, to use Parsec in order to access our dedicated machines for the tournament (two Shadow machines hosted in Paris), you need to sign up with a mail and password to setup an account with them (they have a free version of the application that is thankfully enough for our needs). Once this is done, they will send you a mail to confirm your account. You can then download the application.

Once you reached this step, you can do one of the following depending on wether you want to join another computer or host a session on yours:

• Click the blue "Share" button to create a link to your computer you can share with your mutuals
• Paste a link shared by one of your mutuals on the bottom right of the app in the "Join with a share link or Peer ID" field
• Add one of your mutuals as a friend by looking up their user name on the friend tab on the left bar

KeyboardSplitter

In order to play through Parsec with two keyboards, you'll want to download djlastnight's KeyboardSplitter here, however, if you've already downloaded the Phantasmagoria Box, it comes included already in the archive.

KeyboardSplitter works with profiles. We already prepared a set of profiles you can use for each Phantasmagoria game, including Touhou 19. In order to launch the tool, you want to go to the path KeyboardSplitter/KeyboardSplitter/Release/bin and launch KeyboardSplitter.exe. We advise you pin it to your task bar for ease of access in the future.

The first time you start this executable, it may ask you to install some XBox 360 drivers: you need to accept this popup, and then restart your computer once they are properly installed (because Windows needs a restart for the newly installed drivers to be properly loaded in).

Once the software is open and ready for use, you want to do the following things, in the right order:

• Import the splitter_presets.xml file by opening them with the menu option Presets → Import
• Selecting the profile you need by clicking on the "Preset" dropdown, for instance Touhou 19: UDoALG
• Set the number of slots to 1 in the "Slot counts:" dropdown on the top left of the window
• Click on the two dots (..) at the right of the "Choose keyboard:" pannel and press a key for your keyboard to be detected properly
• Set the "Choose mouse:" related dropdown to "None" (so that you can still use your mouse)
• Click the "Start" button on the top right corner of the window
• To check everything works well, go to the menu option Controllers → Test Xinput Controllers

At this this point, the following window should open:

You can use it to test all of your keyboard inputs are properly remapped to different buttons on the virtual XBox 360 controller. Once this is done, you can close this window, but there is NO NEED to press the "Stop" button. At this point you're set and ready to go. You may notice you can't use your keyboard anymore (to alt+tab or type in Discord), this is actually expected since all of your keys are fed into the virtual controller. Whenever you need your keyboard back, you can however press ctrl+alt+delete to stop the mapping (this might open the security screen, if it does press escape to come back to your session).

As you still have control of your mouse if you followed the previous steps properly, you can use it to navigate to the game you want to play. An important note: if you use this with Parsec, you want to connect to the host before opening up and activating the KeyboardSplitter. This means if you've already started it to test it locally, the next steps look something like this:

• Click the "Stop" button to stop mapping your keyboard to the virtual controller
• Connect to the distant host on parsec, either through their invite link or by joining their computer directly if you added them as friend
• The host then needs to accept you. By default, you should be allowed to use a Gamepad already, so they shouldn't have to change anything
• Click "Start" again after connecting through Parsec, and try to press a few keys. The host should here an external device connection sound

Sometimes, the virtual gamepad might not be recognized instantly. That is usually fixed by having the host start the game you want to play with them, and then trying to input a few keys again. An important note is that if the game was already started, they likely want to restart it again AFTER you connect with them through Parsec.

If you stop and restart the program too fast you might get an error that looks like this:

If that happens, simply wait 5s and click "Start" again.

Known Bugs

This software has a few known bugs that can be pretty annoying to deal with.

• First and foremost, it can crash. Usually, if that happens, you just need to restart the executable, and follow again the steps described at the start of this document to setup your keyboard mapping again.
• Secondly, the input lag might be unbearably long in some rare cases, leading to a terrible gaming experience. If that is the case, try to stop the keyboard mapping and plug the keyboard into another USB outlet. From personal experience, you might also need to restart your computer to fix this issue.

JoyToKey

JoyToKey is a tool that allows remapping of a gamepad to a keyboard. It is mainly used to play PoDD with controls that aren't swapped, as there isn't any way in game or with DOSBox-X to remap the inputs. It can be used directly by the Parsec host, you will just need to remap the following buttons for it to work as expected with a single gamepad.

• POV: up
• POV: right
• POV: down
• POV: left
• Button 1
• Button 2
• Button 3 (for UDoALG)

Playing with 2 gamepads hasn't been tested yet, but in that case both players can remap each to their half of the keyboard needed (so that to emulate a split keyboard in game). This session will get updated in the future to add keybindings specific to that special case.