Post by itchtoplay in No Joystick

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Thanks. They are simple joystick/gamepads (8-direction arcade stick and a few buttons). No analog shaft/control etc. and no Competition Pro. Two of them are connected via 9-pin (Atari-type) to USB adapters. The third has a direct USB cable. They have no configuration options. I can only see them in the "Setup USB game controllers" section where simple test/calibration settings are available. I cannot really change anything there.

I tried disconnecting them, and restart Blastaway with only one connected but nothing changed. Perhaps the installer version might give a better "integration" with Windows, or I'd get the same result?

RETREAM6 years ago

Calibration settings? Can you show me a screenshot or a video of the calibration process, please?

The installer doesn't have any bearing here. For a joystick/joypad to work, this is what has to happen:

the device must have at least a digital direction control and a digital button;
the device must be correctly detected and handled by the OS;
the OS must correctly report the joystick to the SDL library (the only third-party component used by Blastaway);
the SDL library must correctly handle what reported by the OS.

Unfortunately, I don't have any control over the above, as the Blastaway program sees only what reported by the SDL library.

itchtoplay6 years ago

I'm sure 1 and 2 apply. About 3-4, have no idea. They work normally under emulators like MAME or WinUAE. They don't really need calibration, although one of them might require it every once in a while. Here's a video:

RETREAM6 years ago

Thanks a lot for the video! From what I see, it looks like the system treats your device as if it were analogue: in fact, a digital device doesn't need calibration at all (each direction is either on or off, so all that's needed is 4 bits) and your test/calibration program assigns an 8 bit value to each axis (0 = left/up; 128 = center; 255 = right/down).
If it's OK with you, tomorrow I'll send you a test program that will show us how the joystick is reported to the game. Can you contact me by email, please?

itchtoplay6 years ago (1 edit)

Sent you an email. I thought so too about calibration but as mentioned, every once in a while at least one of these joysticks "loses it" and stops working. Re-calibrating makes it work again. The 're-calibration' process of course is just moving the stick into all 8 directions and pressing a button. I agree it shouldn't be necessary but I'm guessing the USB conversion/emulation is dodgy, since these aren't really "native" USB devices.

RETREAM6 years ago

Email received, thanks. I'll answer as soon as possible. In the meanwhile, my guess is...

The chain is like this:

joystick -> OS <-> SDL ->Blastaway

The problem probably lies in the fact that something in the joystick -> OS part (I'd say the default OS drivers) make the joysticks look as if they were analogue. As a consequence, SDL and then Blastaway are told that the joystick are analogue.

itch.io

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