sdl-jstest

sdl-jstest and sdl2-jstest are simple programs that lets you find out how many joysticks SDL or SDL2 detected on your system, how many axes, buttons, hats and balls they have each. They also lets you test the joysticks by displaying the events they send or by displaying their current button, axis, hat or ball state. sdl-jstest is especially useful if you want to test your SDL_LINUX_JOYSTICK configuration.

Screenshots

Requirements

sdl-jstest requires the following packages to build:

cmake
libsdl1.2-dev
libsdl2-dev
libncurses5-dev

Submodules

To fetch submodule dependencies:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Compilation

To compile type:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

To install (optional):

make install

The DESTDIR and PREFIX can be configured as follows:

make install DESTDIR=/tmp/pingus

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr

Cross-compilation to Win32

MXE (http://mxe.cc) is needed. Follow its installation instructions, but you can build it with just the needed packages for sdl-jstest:

make gcc cmake sdl sdl2 ncurses pdcurses

This still takes quite a while.

After MXE installation finishes, for sdl-jstest compilation type:

mkdir build
cd build
i686-w64-mingw32.static-cmake ..
make

Configuration

The SDL behaviour of what axis is treated as a hat and which as normal axis can be configured with the environment variable SDL_LINUX_JOYSTICK:

ftp://ptah.lnf.kth.se/pub/misc/sdl-env-vars

SDL_LINUX_JOYSTICK: Special joystick configuration string for linux. The format is "name numaxes numhats numballs" where name is the name string of the joystick (possibly in single quotes), and the rest are the number of axes, hats and balls respectively.

A simple example would be:

$ export SDL_LINUX_JOYSTICK="'Xbox Gamepad (userspace driver)' 6 0 0"

Which makes all axis be handled as normal axis and none as hat, as most games don't use hats.