USB GamePads and Joysticks

[mantisspider]

Hi Guys,

Has anyone been able to use USB gamepads and joysticks on their amiga? does the amiga recognise these as controllers or does there need to be some software emulation? I dont know how the amiga would be able to recognise these if a game is booted up rather than the OS first, cos even windows needs to have the gamepad set up in its control panel.

No more broken joysticks or sega joypads. some nice gamepads with lots of buttons and feedback vibrations on the amiga would be cool.

i hate to say it but the amiga needs to conform as much to everyone elses standards as quick as possible. i really want to be like marge simpson and say, "be yourself honey" but even she knew when to stick on a big plastic smile just to be popular.

AmigaOne and Pegasos supporting AGP, PCI and USB 2.0 is groovey, means we get to use all the high power hardware being developed by the rest of the world. all we need now are the drivers :-)

hmmm anyway to use old amiga joysticks on an amigaOne? :-D

[platon42]

I'm currently working on it. Got a niffy joypad here with a digital direction pad (hatswitch) and two analogue sticks and ten (!) buttons. Yesterday, I used one of the sticks to control the mouse pointer. Lowlevel emulation is next. However, it will only work with games, that don't disable the multitasking (obviously) and use the lowlevel library instead of hardware hacking.

[Graff]

Hi mantisspider

I'm currently working on a USB joystick driver for the Sirion USB stack. The driver is running and accepting joystick events.
This driver will, however, be for AmigaInput - the gaming device API in AmigaOS4 - and will not be working under OS3. I don't see any real benefit of doing such a driver for OS3 - it will be a minimal number of games with which it will work under OS3 anyway.

Regards
 Thomas Graff Thøger
 ... Unified Amiga USB Development Effort

[mantisspider]

Hi Guys,

Platon42, good luck mate. its great that someone has taken on such a project.

Graf; cheers mate, its great to know that OS4 has this taken care of. How is it coming along? can it work with feedback joystick/gamepads and can we use the stearing wheel & footpads controllers too? :-)

[Kronos]

platon42 wrote:
 Yesterday, I used one of the sticks to control the mouse pointer.

No need to write a driver for that  :-o Just buy a Saitek P880 and you get
that feature out of the box :-P

Poseidon (on Pegasos) seems to thinlk it is a mouse :lol:

[KennyR]

Chris, have you thought about collaborating with Guido Mersmann? He's the coder of the NewLowLevel for Amithlon which also supports catweasel, PC game ports, and Pegasos game ports, and will run on Amiga and MOS too. Maybe he will add support for Poseidon as well.

[platon42]

This "feature" to automatically assign all kinds of axis to the mouse is fixed with the next release. A bit stupid to have the mouse stuck on the screen after plugging in a joypad.

[platon42]

Sounds like a good idea (I'll have him on the phone later this day anyway), but then I have to add an API from the HID class to the outside. Actually, that lowlevel patching is just an temporary solution, until we've got the new Input API in MOS. Lowlevel is, as Thomas said, not sufficient to cope with all the possible input devices.

[platon42]

Done Works nicely.