Being too cheap and nerdy to buy a third Dual Sense for when the kids want to play with me, I started thinking about finding a way to use the 3 Stadia Controllers I have instead.

Without reading the fine print, I bought a Brook Wingman P5 instead of a new dual sense only to realise, it doesn't work with the Stadia Controller.

Not letting that get in my way, I bought a Raspberry Pico WH and got to work.

Some agentic coding and a lot of testing and trial and error later, I'm happy to report, it works!

Now, it costs about the same as a Dual Sense and all, but hey, sometimes its about the journey!

Here's how to do it yourself;

Prerequisites;

A Brook Wingman P5 (https://www.brookaccessory.com/products/wingmanp5/index.html)

A Raspberry Pico WH (or just W if you're into soldering)

A USB Y splitter (2 male, 1 female)

A computer.

The code found here: https://github.com/BjornBrorsson/Stadia\_Pico\_PS5/

Step 1, update the Wingman P5 via your computer.

Step 2, plug in your Raspberry Pico to your computer while holding the bootloader button.

Step 3, download, build by running build.ps1 (Windows) or build.sh (Mac/Linux) and flash the stadia_ps5_bridge.uf2 file onto the Pico by moving it to the drive.

Step 4, plug the Wingman P5 into a USB slot on the PlayStation 5, plug the data-male connector on the Y splitter into the Wingman and the other one into another PS5 USB port OR another source of power (the P5 doesn't transmit enough power to run the pico by itself), then plug the pico into the female end of the splitter via a micro USB cable

Step 5, hold Y+Stadia Button on your controller.

If it all worked like for me, your P5 will have a solid blue led light, the Pico slowly flash or be solid green and the Stadia led being solid white, and you can now use your Stadia Controller on a PS5 (should also work on PS4 and with other devices than the P5).

The Pico connects to the Controller via Bluetooth LE and converts the signals to that of an Xbox 360 controller, tricking the P5 in this case that it is another device that IS supported!

Hope this helps someone out there!

Context

I've played RDR2 through Stadia when it was available, and spent hours on it. Then, Google Stadia shut down in January 2023. Before shutdown, players could export their save files via Google Takeout (Takeout/Stadia/GAMING/GAME_SAVE/). Each save slot comes as a {game}_{id}_gamesave.zip + a companion _metadata.json file.

I thought I could manage to reuse those saves in the PC version, but still no luck.

Here are the things I've gathered with the retro-engineering skill of Claude.

For Red Dead Redemption 2, the zip contains a single file named identically to the PC save slot naming convention (e.g. SRDR30015), which strongly suggests Rockstar reused the same internal save-slot structure across platforms. Unfortunately, simply copying these files into the PC save folder does not work — the game reports "no save files are present" (confirmed independently by another user here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1174180/discussions/0/3788128816406449519/)..)

I've been trying to reverse-engineer the Stadia save format to convert it to the PC format (which is unencrypted — RDR2 PC saves start with a plaintext UTF-16LE save name string). Posting my findings here in case someone has more context or resources than I do.

What I compared

• PC save (SRDR30015, 673,232 bytes): unencrypted. Starts directly with a UTF-16LE save name string, e.g. (Sauvegarde automatique) L'émergence d'un souvenir (2.7%) - 04.
• Stadia save, same slot (SRDR30015 inside the Takeout zip, 836,496 bytes): high entropy from byte 0, no readable header, no plaintext strings.

Finding 1: it's AES in ECB mode

Splitting the Stadia ciphertext into 16-byte blocks (52,280 blocks total) and counting duplicates:

1 specific 16-byte block appears 9,733 times (~18.6% of all blocks!)
Most frequent block: 6b10984872f81ed72348772a2bfd1a8

That level of exact, byte-for-byte repetition at 16-byte-aligned boundaries only happens with ECB mode encrypting long runs of identical plaintext (almost certainly zero-padding / empty inventory slots / unused array entries — a very common pattern in game save structures). Any other mode (CBC, CTR, etc.) would not produce this.

Total file size (836,496 bytes) is an exact multiple of 16, consistent with a pure block-cipher payload (possibly with a plaintext header before the encrypted region, similar to consoles).

Finding 2: the known PS4/Xbox key does NOT match

There's a known AES-256-ECB key used for RDR2 (and GTA V) on PS4/Xbox, documented here:

• https://github.com/Zhaxxy/rdr2_enc_dec
• https://github.com/bucanero/save-decrypters (ps4-rdr2-decrypter, gta5-decrypter)

​

GTA5_AND_REDDEAD_KEY = b'\x16\x85\xff\xa3\x8d\x01\x0f\r\xfef\x1c\xf9\xb5W,P\r\x80&H\xdb7\xb9\xed\x0fH\xc5sB\xc0"\xf5'

I tested this key (and variants: byte-reversed, AES-128 using first/last 16 bytes) against every 16-byte-aligned offset in the Stadia file, looking for the expected decrypted header magic (RSAV / PSIN, per the PS4 tool's logic). No match anywhere.

More conclusively: since we know the most common ciphertext block almost certainly decrypts to 16 zero bytes, the correct key must satisfy AES_ECB_Encrypt(key, 0x00*16) == 6b10984872f81ed72348772a2bfd1a8.... The known PS4/Xbox key does not satisfy this:

AES-256(known_key, zeros) = 3b50a400e5d0e839579f04e57ae0b9a6   (expected: 6b10984872f81ed7...)

So: same encryption scheme (AES-256-ECB), different key (or possibly different key-derivation) on Stadia vs. PS4/Xbox.

What I'm looking for

• Has anyone documented the Stadia-specific key, or a key-derivation scheme, for RDR2/GTA5 cloud saves?
• Is there any chance Stadia added an additional wrapping layer (Google-side encryption on top of Rockstar's own), rather than a different Rockstar key?
• Any pointers to a memory dump, leaked SDK, or binary from the Stadia client (even partial) that might contain the key are welcome.

Happy to share the zero-block ciphertext, full entropy analysis, or test candidate keys against the known-plaintext-block check above if it helps someone continue this.

So, I had this problem a few days ago ever since I bought the Stadia controller online. The L2 and R2 buttons don't work on most of the games that I've played. Though the rest of the buttons do. I've learned by researching that the buttons are analog inputs instead of digital, which is the sole reason some games don't recognize it.

I've checked this other forums for the solution, but most of them only apply for PC. So I dug deeper.

I found this apo called "Key Mapper" which allows you to not only remap your phone buttons, but also remap your gamepad inputs! Neat, right? This allowed me to remap the L2 and R2 buttons from analog to digital input. This way, the games will recognize it.

So what I did is turn on the accessibility settings on my phone and make sure that the app runs in background and prevent it from getting killed.

And voila! It worked like a charm. I was able to test this on emulators, Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero which previously had this issue, but is now working okay.

Hope everyone that's also having the same issue find this helpful!

This has probably been around for a while, but I only just discovered this section of playable games within YouTube.

Hi, so I have the controller firmware patched and it won't pair with my phone. I could really use a hand thank you.