how does the simulator work when the corrupted party has no input?
A simulator is a thought experiment whose purpose is to:


show that the adversary learns no more about the honest party's inputs than he's supposed to,
show that the adversary's effect on the honest party's output is consistent with a legitimate input.


If the functionality takes no input from the corrupt party, #2 is moot but we still have #1. A canonical example is the zero-knowledge functionality, which takes no input from the verifier. When the verifier is corrupt, the purpose of the simulator is to demonstrate the zero-knowledge property.

There is no general implication between semi-honest and malicious security. Take any semi-honest protocol and modify it to add the behavior "if the other person sent me the message $(\textsf{asdf}, v)$ then send my input to that party and output $v$." Adding this behavior to the protocol doesn't affect semi-honest security since honest parties never send each other $\textsf{asdf}$ messages. But the effect on malicious security should be clear, and it has nothing to do with which party has input, etc.