Joystick support

Last sunday I went to a bric-a-brac sale. I was looking for a steering wheel to adapt to my emulator. I bought a Wingman Formula Force GP for 5€:


This wheel is quite old – it was released in 2002 – but it still has a force feedback and a usb connector (older steering wheels have a gameport connector). It is probably outdated but I bet I can’t find better for that price.

I committed some code that enables the use of this controller with the sixaxis emulator. It uses the joystick API of the SDL library. The code is not well designed and has some limitations (only one joystick plugged to the PC, mappings are hardcoded…), but it is for now a proof of concept. It can be activated by modifying the Makefile: remove the # character from the line “#CFLAGS+=-DJOYSTICK”, and perform a make clean and a make.

Note that your joystick may be wrapped by default to a mouse and/or a keyboard by your linux distro. This is annoying because it generates extra mouse/keyboard events that interfere with real mouse and keyboard events in the emulator. This behavior can be configured/removed with the xinput command line utility. For more info on that command, type “xinput –help”.

 

One Reply to “Joystick support”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *