I was given a Gamemon USB joystick which is an old-school d-pad form factor
controller that is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Initially
rebooting my Trisquel box with it plugged in did show it was detected, but it
was forever moving left in the game (I used Alex the Allegator to test).
After installing xserver-xorg-input-joystick and joystick as per the only
other thread hear on joysticks, I also decided to put jstest-gtk on as well.
That is what ended up working. One invokes jstest-gtk from a terminal and the
USB joystick will appear on a list. Then you click 'properties' and
'calibration'. Click 'start calibration', move the d-pad to its 8 extremes,
and click 'ok'. Now this last part is crucial, you must rearrange the
axis-mappings so that up is up, left is left, etc. in the graphical
representation presented. For my game-pad, I had to click 'mapping', and on
the left column/panel, click and drag the list of axes so they were in the
following order:
0: ABS_RX
1: ABS_RY
2; ABS_X
3: ABS_Y
4: ABS_Z
5: ABS_MISC
I saved my settings to a preset configuration, but honestly it seems to
vanish upon reboot. I do not think the ABS_Z and ABS_MISC are as important
for this particular joystick, but you must verify that the graphical display
shows the plus sign resting in the center of each circle and that moving the
d-pad affects the left circle crosshair.
You may still have to set the joystick up in individual programs like
SuperTux2 or if you have any emulators.
I am not an expert at this and if there is a better way, feel free to improve
this post. I just figured this out by tinkering. I now have a fun way to get
into ROM's and native games like Alex the Allegator, SuperTux2, etc.
This seems simple but as there are not a lot of posts here on joysticks, I
figured users of a 100% libre distro would want to know that it is possible
to do some gaming as well.
Happy Hacking and remember fun is sometimes serious and important!
