Guitar Rig 2 in Linux/Wine

[Kuba Ober]

On Monday 20 February 2006 19:34, Michael Ost wrote:
> We are interested in getting the new Guitar Rig 2 USB foot controller
> supported in Linux/Wine. It's described here:
>
> http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=guitarrig2_us
>
> I assume from looking at it, that a USB driver would be required and
> then perhaps some Wine tweaks to let the plugin open the USB driver.

It'd be probably helpful to know more about the device itself. Does it expose 
a standard USB audio interface? If so, that function could be handled by 
Linux alsa kernel driver for USB (if such a thing exists), or one could be 
written as specs are public. How are the buttons exposed? As HID, or 
something custom?

If the USB driver is a WDM driver then there's no trivial way to utilize it in 
Wine. It'd be better to simply get the device to work using native Linux 
drivers, or get full specs to have it work with libusb which would make it 
more portable (heck, the libusb adapter layer could be used to run it on 
windows too, at least for testing).

It'd be also useful to know what sort of interface the driver exposes to the 
application. Is there a special .dll for interfacing the driver? Or do you 
directly do DeviceOpen followed by some custom ioctls? Do you use 
DirectInput?

I presume it'd make matters much simpler if the specs for the hardware's USB 
interface were made public. It's not like anyone could use it to your 
detriment, besides enabling use of your hardware.  We all know that it's an 
unfortunate "industry standard" to develop hardware, never publish any specs, 
have it on market for a year or two, and then let it slide into obsolescence. 
Companies mumble something about proprietary and trade secret this or that 
when explaining themselves for lack of specs, while the truth of the matter 
is just ignorance and inertia :(

Cheers, Kuba