PC Game controller round-up

Nelson http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/29579#466683 "orthogonality, but do you know about the http://www.handykey.com/?" Yeah, I've considered it. But chording with multiple fingers on one hand won't, I think, work for me. Besides, what do you do with the other hand (unless you're surfing porn)? Game controllers, on the other hand, have been tested a lot more -- all those damned kids playing their games -- and only requires chording with the thumbs. I think that'll work better for me.

No idea if this will be useful, but I just read about the http://alphagrips.com/ (via http://www.joystiq.com/) -- it's got a crazy number of buttons and is designed for typing, apparently.

Yeah, the Saitek driver software allows a truly ludicrous amount of customisation, including assigning keypresses to buttons, and keypresses or mouse axis movements to the analog sticks. You could even do something ridiculous like have 33% of the stick's left travel press a key and the other 67% act as a joystick or mouse. What I don't know, though, is if the software allows you to assign keys to button chords, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. Having said all that, though, I've got a P880 and the right analog stick tends to drift a bit when set to emulate a mouse. I dunno if you even require that function, but that might indicate slightly lax quality control, maybe. Otherwise it's a nice piece of gear, it's too bad more games don't support gamepads.

http://www.saitekusa.com/usa/prod/P880.htm, I have two. They are the duck's guts.

Not quite what you're looking for, but there are a number of joysticks that come with multiple hat switches, including what JZig linked to. You could then immobilize the joystick/throttles entirely and use them solely as handgrips, using the hat switches for typing. Triggers on the throttle/joystick handle your mode functions as before. For an added bonus, you could leave the joystick free to act as the mouse (assuming you could find drivers/software to let you do this). Can't tell you whether this would be any good ergonomically, though. Another option is simply to hack a direction pad onto the cluster of four buttons on the right side by ripping one of another controller and literally pasting it onto the four buttons (perhaps also drilling in a center post). As long as the controller can send signals for two buttons from the cluster at the same time, it should work the same as a second d-pad, and depending on how much time you want to spend hacking the controller, it could feel like a second d-pad as well. All this without having to worry about the underlying logic boards.

JZig http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/29579#466707 "Something like this: http://www.saitekusa.com/usa/prod/x52.htm" No, I want to move the thumbs and fingers, not the wrist. I suppose analog joysticks are ok, if you put a plastic "channeling" grid over them, limiting their travel to along the channels. The point is, you want the user to be able to "type" quickly, so you want to screen out intermediate values. If the controller is cheap enough, I'm more than willing to rip it apart and modify it to get what I want.

Oh. Apparently you need additional support for joysticks. The module name is "joydev". My Gentoo kernel has a driver specifically for X-Box gamepads. Would that be good?

orthogonality: the thng that looks like an 8-way on the left isn't recognized as an 8-way, really. PC joysticks are defined in terms of axis (which are analog values from like -1 to 1) and buttons. The shown joystick has 6 axis and... 10 buttons probably. I don't think a traditional console joystick will work as a keyboard replacement, frankly. Your best bet would be custom software that converts axis position into 8 way directions, and generates a keymap from that. But loquacious brings up a good idea: the joystick he's talking abour is a more traditional PC simulation joystick, I think. Something like this: http://www.saitekusa.com/usa/prod/x52.htm could definitely act like a keyboard replacement, although I don't really know how easy it would be to set up. It certainly has enough buttons, and the software for simulation joysticks tends to be very good.

In linux usb gamepads are handled by the usb human interface device driver. It just enumerates the buttons and gives x,y values for the analog sticks. Sounds like just what you need, right? A couple years ago I had a dorm room where the bed was lofted above the rest of the room. In the interest of not falling down the strairs in the middle of the night, I used http://www.pygame.org/ to control xmms from my bed. It worked flawlessly.