Tincore Keymapper for Android

Why I think this is Awesome

It lets me play games on my Android TV stick - games that only respond to touches on a touch-screen.  If I lost you just now, I'll assume you don't know what an Android TV stick is, or at least, you know but use a different term for it.  Either way, take a look at this picture of an Android TV stick (not mine, but same model):

Notice the complete lack of a screen to look at or touch.  

Yes, yes, just a stick with an HDMI port and some USB ports.  (OK, and a microSD card slot, but let's not get too detailed.)

Now you can appreciate my giddiness about Tincore.

The Basics

In a nutshell, Tincore is an app that lets you use an input device (e.g. keyboard) to emulate other kinds of inputs (e.g. touches on a touch screen) for an Android device.  And it works great!

It's capable of accepting input from a number of devices including keyboards, mice and gamepads.  I have only ever tried (and had the desire) to test with keyboards and mice, but I'm under the impression that it can do a lot more than I've ever used it for.

You can configure individual profiles for each app, allowing you to set up very customized layouts for the games you want to play.  Right now I have several profiles saved for games such as:  Hillclimb Racer, Wind-up Knight, and Dark Guardians.  You can set up Tincore to automatically switch profiles to whatever is currently running in the foreground, to save yourself the hassle of switching it yourself.

How to Use It

Tincore lets you remap inputs to other input types, or to control the Tincore app itself.  Tincore basically has 3 modes:

• Profile editing mode, when the Tincore UI overlay is visible allowing you to set up the different key/button presses to map and change the programme settings
• Active mode, when Tincore is now translating all the mappings that you've defined for the current profile
• Paused mode, when a mapping profile has been activated but Tincore is not performing any of the mapping
• This is an incredibly handy mode to have mapped to a key/button, for situations when you've screwed up your profile and can't stop the app because you've mapped all the important control keys to something else!

On launching Tincore, it puts an icon into the Notification Tray.  Clicking on this icon will display the mapping overlay, putting you into the profile editing mode.  At this point, any buttons you press on your keyboard or mouse will show up on the screen as transparent labeled shapes.

Keyboard Key Presses

By default, keyboard key presses are mapped as simple "Touch screen" events and show up as circles.  These are ideal for playing games with on-screen touch controls, such as the game shown here with the brake and gas pedals as touchable controls (on either side of the screen!  This game does work with a mouse, but it is haaaard to play that way).

If you have a mouse attached, you can click and drag the circles to the points on the screen that you want to "touch" whenever that keyboard key is pressed.  If you want to change what happens on pressing the key, just click on the "Touch screen" label within the UI side panel and a list of available options shows up.  For example, to set up function keys F1 and F2 to toggle the UI overlay (i.e. profile editing mode) or pause the mapping (i.e. paused mode), click each key on the keyboard, then select their "Touch screen" label and change the action to "EXECUTE > MAPPER" and "EXECUTE > PAUSE".

Using the Mouse as a Touch Pointer

To have your mouse emulate your finger and create “touch events” anywhere the cursor is

positioned, do the following:

1) Set up the “Relative r0” component to: "Move hybrid pointer"

2) Set up the mouse click “m0” to: Touch hybrid pointer

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Drawbacks and such

The biggest point to make right now is that, AFAIK, root is required to get the most out of this app.  I've read that from a number of articles, but I cannot tell you what features are root-only because my Android device was rooted long before I installed Tincore.

Besides that, here are 2 other items I have noticed:

1) My Android device can slow down big time when the UI mapping overlay is visible.  Of course, it's fine for a game to run sluggish while I'm configuring it, but it certainly makes it more awkward to do.

2) I have yet to figure out how to get Tincore to emulate slight tilting, which is required to play games like Temple Run or Minion Rush.  By tilting I mean when you physically tilt your Android smartphone/tablet left or right so that the character in the game shifts/leans in that direction.

Boring Monotonous Video

What's an article these days without a video link?  If you have 3 minutes of your life to waste away, go ahead and click this Youtube link:

I took extra special care to speak in monotone and suck all energy and life out of my voice, just for you!  This video just shows how to set up a few keyboard buttons as regular touches, and then save & activate the new profile.  It also has a very blurry shot of my keyboard/air-mouse - apologies on that, next time I'll be sure to have the camera focused on the subject.

Links

If you do a search for "Tincore Keymapper", you'll find tonnes of stuff, including tutorials that are far more useful/detailed/thorough than this one.

I'll give you a headstart with some very good links:

• Tincore Keymapper in the Google Play store
• the description within the app page has links to the app wiki
• a Youtube video on Tincore ostensibly made by the developer (don't see why not to believe it)