Hitbox Tester for Leverless Controllers

The leverless layout

A leverless controller replaces the lever with four buttons. On a Hit Box, Hit Box’s own guide puts it simply: left, down and right sit next to each other like the A, S and D of WASD, and up is the big button at the bottom, pressed with either thumb. The eight attack buttons are on the right, in the same two rows as an arcade stick. The panel above draws that arrangement, and each direction button lights up on its own, so a dead switch or a swapped wire shows immediately.

Leverless controllers send their directions as the d-pad or, in some modes, as the left stick. The tester reads both; the numpad display and the input history look the same either way.

Checking the SOCD mode

A lever physically can’t point left and right at once, but a leverless controller can hold both buttons, so its firmware decides what to send: this is SOCD cleaning. Start the SOCD check and follow the four steps: hold left and add right, hold right and add left, hold down and add up, hold up and add down, tapping any attack button each time while both are held. The result names the mode for each pair:

• Neutral: the two directions cancel out.
• Last input priority: the newer direction wins.
• First input priority: the direction held first wins.
• Up priority: up + down gives up.
• Both sent: the controller passes both through and leaves it to the game.

Hit Box’s SOCD modes page lists its standard mode as left + right = neutral and up + down = up, with True Neutral, Last Input Priority and a mode with no SOCD resolution as alternatives. Razer’s Firmware 2.0 announcement for the Kitsune (March 2024) lists Neutral as its default, plus Absolute Up Priority, Last Input Priority, First Input Priority and, on PC only, No SOCD Cleaning. If the check shows a mode you didn’t expect, switch modes with your controller’s shortcut and run it again.

Other things worth checking

Switches wear out on leverless controllers too, and a worn one chatters: the chatter table flags a second press within 15 ms. It judges only the buttons here: when you hold forward and tap back, SOCD cleaning drops forward for a moment, which would otherwise look like chatter. The diagonal check works here too: it shows how many frames pass between the two direction buttons of a corner registering, which is mostly your fingers, not the hardware. Watch the frames held column while you practise dashes or crouch-techs: on a leverless controller, one-frame gaps between directions are easy to make by accident, and they show up there.

The button map on this page

The panel above opens in the Leverless layout. In XInput or PlayStation mode, a stick reports each button under the W3C standard gamepad number below. If yours lights up the wrong button, it uses another order: click Remap buttons and press each one when it’s highlighted.