What you need: Xenia, Steam

Effect: Makes your analog stick act like a d-pad, where the emulator treats all analog movement as if you're using a d-pad, rounding all inputs to one of 8 directions (and neutral if you're not holding anything). You can also remap buttons to do whatever you want and change the analog input curves.

Step-by-step guide: Open Steam and add Xenia as a non-steam game (Games -> add non-steam game) Go to Steam's Big Picture mode and find Xenia in there Click on Xenia, then "Manage Shortcut", then "Controller Configuration" This is where you can remap everything on your controller.

If you are getting an error message saying "controller configuration disabled", go back to the main menu in big picture mode and go to settings -> controller settings. This is where you can enable controller configuration for the type of controller you're using.

To make the left stick act like a d-pad: click the box on the bottom left (the one pointing to the left stick) Under "style of input", select "directional pad". The layout should be 8-way (overlap). In the center of the screen, there is a d-pad icon with 4 circles on each direction. Click on each of those circles and bind the analog stick motion to those directions. the up button on the d-pad should correspond to pressing forward on the analog stick. Do that for the rest of the directions. In the end, it should look like this: The overlap region controls the range the analog changes direction. If movement feels weird like you aren't strafing when you should be, try changing this setting.

To edit analog curves: Click on the box pointing to whichever analog stick you want to edit go to "additional settings" there should be a setting for "response curve". Change this to make the analog stick more or less aggressive. There are other cool settings here, too. Play around with it and see what you like.

To remap buttons: In the same menu you selected the analog sticks in, you can also select buttons to swap them around or change what they do entirely. For example, if you're using a switch pro controller but you want it mapped like an xbox controller, you can swap the face buttons around in this menu by clicking on the buttons and mapping them how you like.

Now you should be able to exit big picture mode and start Xenia through Steam. Your controller settings should stay the way you set them. If they don't, start Xenia in big picture mode and just minimize Steam to get it out of the way. What's really nice about this is that it only does this for Xenia, and only while Steam is running. So if you want to play another game in Xenia, just exit steam and your buttons and analog stick will work like normal.