Android emulator touch controls mapping

Android emulators run two mapping systems at once: on-screen touch controls and physical pad bindings. They are stored separately and behave separately, which is why editing one leaves the other untouched — and why people who only adjust the pad binding still see the wrong button on the glass.

The two layers

The on-screen layer has its own scale factor, its own rotation behaviour, and its own limits. Several of those limits are open requests rather than settings you missed:

• Touch controls need a separate scale factor from the rest of the UI: PPSSPP #21417
• Touch controls should auto-hide once a joystick is detected: PPSSPP #16752
• Remapping touch controls, mainly the right thumbstick: PPSSPP #9859
• “Rotate controls” affects pad input but not touch input: PPSSPP #21245
• The right stick is not represented on touch controls the way the left one is: PPSSPP #21772
• Touch mapping accepts combination keys, pad mapping does not: PPSSPP #21186

Set a touch layout that actually fits

1. Open the touch control editor, not the game
   In PPSSPP go to Settings, then Controls, then Touch Control Layout. Editing here moves the real buttons; scaling the whole app UI or changing your phone's display size does not.
   Buttons move on screen while you drag them, before you start a game.
2. Set the layout first, then the size
   Place every button where your thumbs already rest, then adjust the touch scale. Doing it in the other order means you re-place everything after the size changes.
   Both thumbs reach every button without stretching or covering the game view.
3. Test each button individually
   Use the emulator's button test to press every on-screen key once. An on-screen button that never registers is usually sitting under another control's hit area rather than being a broken binding.
   Every on-screen button reports a press in the test screen.
4. Add combination keys on the touch layer
   Touch controls support combination bindings, which is how you reach shortcuts without extra buttons. Pad mapping does not offer the same option, so do not look for it on the pad side.
   The combination fires from the touch layout alone, with no pad attached.
5. Decide whether the overlay stays visible with a pad connected
   If you play with a pad and the overlay still covers the screen, the hide-on-joystick option is not in every build yet — that is the open request above, not a setting you misconfigured. Hide it manually in the layout editor meanwhile.
   The overlay is out of the way while the pad is in use.

Related

If the pad itself is not seen at all, that is the other layer — see Android emulator controller not working. Binding a pad on a PC is covered in 8BitDo button mapping, and the Switch-on-phone caveats live in running Switch games on Android.