Listing of "compatible USB controllers" for the simulator?

SDK Bug Reports
1

In "3.4. Using the Playdate Simulator" of Inside Playdate, it is mentioned that "The simulator can also be controlled by a select number of a compatible USB game controllers..."

Is there a list of these controllers, or at least the magic bits that are needed to make a USB controller work with it? (or to make a USB controller that could work with it)

2

Most USB/Bluetooth controllers should work if they have a driver or are supported by the host OS. We've ensured the latest Xbox controllers, Steelseries Nimbus, PowerA Pro wireless controller and PS 4/5 controllers work.

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3

Gotcha. I have an arduino leonardo which is reporting itself as a joystick controller, detected by other MacOS apps ("Controllers Lite" and "Joystick Show", as well as some games like "Stella").

I do have a old USB Gravis Gamepad Pro, which was detected just fine. I tried to make my Leonardo appear with the same capabilities (10 buttons, two axes) but it did not show up.
As a sidenote I also have a RetroLink Sega Saturn-looking controller which works fine... but the simulator thinks it's an SNES controller and not all of the buttons are detected properly. (I can provide vendor IDs and how the controls line up to enumerated items if you'd like)

The only two other potential things it could be on my end are:

  • Arduino libraries report axis range from -32768 to 32768, while the Gravis/Retrolink both use a range from 0 to 255
  • The simulator looks at either the vendor ID or some other ID reported for compatible devices (or the name of the device itself)

Any thoughts? (and thank you for the reply!)

4

Yea, but which controllers have a crank? :laughing:

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5

My Arduino Leonardo controller does. ;D

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6

fwiw, i currently have it set up to appear as a keyboard for the joypad, buttons, lock and menu controls, and the rotary encoder appears as a mouse scroll wheel. :wink:

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7

We are using a community developed game controller db from this project which uses vendor and product ID to map the buttons, etc. You can d/l a gamepad mapping app from their GitHub page and submit a mapping for any controllers you use that aren't in the db currently. We'll pick it up from time to time to get any new submissions.

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8

Awesome! Thank you!

(And don't get me wrong, this is all excellent... the developer experience side of using this SDK, Pulp, all of it, has been just... refreshingly comfortable. Cheers to y'all! :smiley:

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