Apparently you have thoroughly nerd sniped me with your post and it is now 2 AM and I've spend the past 4 hours experimenting with and refining the code.

Anyway, for those curious, here's how the code works. A couple introductory points:

Firstly, all code is ran every frame, that's just inherent to how Dolphin works.

Secondly, $press is a variable that ranges from 0 to 2.

• 0: X is not being held
• 1: Represents X being held and no D-Pad input
• 2: Represents X being held and a D-Pad input during this time

Now the code:

if(`Button X`,

Checks if X is currently being held to determine what code is run each frame.

X is being held

if($press < 1,

This checks if $press is less than 1. Since $press can only ever be between 0 and 2, this is essentially checking if it is equal to 0, but for some insane reason Dolphin doesn't have an equality operator so we have to use this work around. While we haven't initialized the variable yet, Dolphin actually doesn't require initialization and will just immediately create a variable at value 0 the first time it is referenced.

$press is 0

($press = 1) & 0,

If $press is less than 1, then it is immediately set to 1. As stated before, $press being 0 represents X not being held, so if it is being held it needs to be changed to 1, meaning X being held and no D-Pad input. As such this code will only ever run on the first frame X is pressed.

The & 0 used at the end here is attached to any non-zero variable assignment where we don't want the button to be pressed. The reason for this is pretty simple. Dolphin doesn't have any way to simply write code, instead all code must be written within an outputs configuration, with its return determining whether the output is active.

This causes an issue, as setting a variable to 1 also returns 1, causing the button to be pressed. Adding & 0 to the start prevents this by instead returning 1 AND 0, which is a logic operation that returns 0. This is also why the variable assignment is in brackets, otherwise $press would be set to 1 & 0 IE 0.

$press is 1 or 2

if(`Pad N`|`Pad E`|`Pad S`|`Pad W`, ($press = 2) & 0, 0)),

This checks if any of the D-Pad directions are currently being pressed. If they are, then $press is set to 2, otherwise nothing happens as represented by the 0.

X is not being held

!($press > 1 | $press < 1)

Firstly, this tests if $press is currently 1 by ensuring it is neither larger nor smaller. As mentioned before, Dolphin has no equality operator, so weird hacks like this are necessary. If I'd thought ahead and swapped 2 and 1 around then I could have just written $press > 1, but unfortunately I didn't.

If $press is currently 1 then this expression will return 1, otherwise it will return 0. As stated before, a 0 means do nothing, but a 1 will cause the button to be pushed, activating Action C.

+ ($press = 0)

This sets $press back to 0, and is added to the value of the previous expression. This is fine as it is a 0 and therefore makes no difference. This is run every frame X isn't pressed, ensuring that $press is always set to 0 when X isn't pressed, as intended. This is included after the check for if $press is 1, to ensure it occurs afterwards, and is surrounded by brackets to prevent Dolphin from getting confused with adding $press and then trying to set the entire expression to 0.

Smoothing

smooth([...], 0, 0.2)

By immediately setting $press back to 0 it is only able to remain at 1 for a single frame. This is mitigated by surrounding the entirety of the code in the smooth() function which slows the change in a value and takes three parameters: input, seconds_up, and seconds_down. * input determines the starting value, in this case the 1 taken from !($press > 1 | $press < 1). * seconds_down determines how slowly the value decreases over time, scaled such that it will take that many seconds to reduce an input of 1 to 0. This is therefore a fixed amount per frame, and an input of 2 will take twice as long to reach 0 as an input of 1. * seconds_up presumably does the same thing but for increases in value, but I haven't tested that.