I DO NOT CONDONE PIRACY, this is meant if you dumped the iso your own copy of a game and just want to play it on PC instead.

Took me forever but I figured it out!

The issue isn't that it doesn't detect a controller but just it has no clue what the buttons are mapped to

Basically I got Shadow and wanted to play BOTW but the issue is you can't map the controller, as Shadow doesn't allow for touch screen functioning.

So as opposed to running Cemu natively on your Win device you can't actually click anything to start the mapping process but you also can't start it until after the controller is turned on.

So one option was to connect an external keyboard and mouse to the Win 2, hope shadow can pick up both the controller and that, and map it.

I don't own a mouse and keyboard so I found another option.

Here's the instructions:

These are techinally profiles to be used with Vjoy and cemu but it happens to have controller profiles already written if you download from here :

https://bitbucket.org/CemuUser8/files/downloads/vJoyControllerProfiles.zip (here's the link to the main page if this gets taken down, just find the download controller profiles link https://github.com/CemuUser8/mouse2joystick_custom_CEMU/releases).

The one I used is the Vbox_Gamepad profile (as it's set to Xinput and the mappings are identical to xbox controller).

Extract it, open it with Notepad, and then you have to add in one line using underneath the API = Xinput line titled "controller = 0".

Rename the file to controller0 and paste it into cemu's controller profiles folder (overwrite the existing one).

And you're good, just switch your GPD to controller after you click to start up the game and cemu will now recognize your controller.

Hopefully this helps. Playing BOTW on Switch is great, but 1080p and on a device that basically has all my other games is even better imo.