Gamepad – D-pad Tester
Press up, down, left, right and the diagonals — this gamepad D-pad tester lights each direction the instant it registers, so you can see at a glance whether your directional pad is responding cleanly.
A reliable D-pad matters most in fighting games, platformers, and menu navigation, where a missed or stuck direction costs you a move. Run the D-pad test below to catch unresponsive directions, ghost inputs, or weak diagonals. Everything happens in your browser through the standard Gamepad API — no download, no signup, nothing leaves your device.
Press a direction to begin
Connect via USB or pair over Bluetooth, then press any D-pad direction so the browser detects your pad.
8-direction check
0 / 8✓ All 8 directions registered — your D-pad passed.
Press each direction — including the four diagonals — to complete the check.
How to use the Gamepad Tester
Running a D-pad test takes under a minute. Follow the four steps below and the tool will detect your controller and start reading directional input automatically.
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1
Connect your controller
Plug the pad in over USB or pair it via Bluetooth. Either connection works — see the panels on the right for setup details for each method.
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2
Press a direction to wake it
Browsers only register a controller after the first input. Press any D-pad direction and the tester switches from the waiting state to the live pad view.
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3
Run the 8-direction check
Press up, down, left, right and all four diagonals. Each direction lights on the visual pad and ticks off on the progress bar as it registers.
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4
Read the result
Reaching 8 of 8 confirms a healthy directional pad. A direction that won't light, or one that fires on its own, points to a fault worth a closer look.
How gamepad testing works
The tester runs entirely on the browser's built-in Gamepad API — the same standard interface games use to read controller input. No drivers, no plugins, and no software installed on your machine. Here is what happens from the moment you connect a pad.
Detection
When you connect a controller and press a direction, the browser fires a connect event and assigns the pad to one of four player slots.
Polling
On every animation frame the tester reads the live state of each button and axis — roughly 60 times a second — so input shows with no perceptible delay.
Mapping
Raw button indices are mapped to D-pad directions and drawn onto the visual pad, so a press becomes a lit, labelled direction you can see.
Because the test reads directly from the controller, it reflects exactly what a game would see. If a direction registers here, it registers in-game; if it doesn't, the fault is in the pad or the connection — not the website. Everything stays local: nothing about your controller leaves your device.
Browser compatibility
The Gamepad API is widely supported, though directional input behaves most consistently on Chromium-based browsers. The table below shows where the D-pad test runs best.
For the most accurate D-pad test, use a current version of Chrome or Edge with a wired USB connection. The tester includes a fallback that reads hat-switch pads which report the D-pad as an axis rather than four buttons.