Wine Joysticks, seeking a plan

Thu Apr 16 08:38:42 CDT 2015

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 04/16/15 15:11, Aric Stewart wrote:
> Ok I sat down with Ken (the benefits of being in the same office)
> and after a lengthy discussion I have come to terms with how it may
> not be the most ideal plan to put the joystick driver into the
> graphics driver. However I am still of the strong opinion that we
> need some sort of better joystick architecture and I know Alexandre
> is also of the like mindset.
One more thing that makes merging this into the graphics driver a bad
idea: Assume we have a Wayland graphics driver one day. It would run
on Linux, just like winex11. The way we talk to joysticks would be the
same though.

> Now completely unresearched but it may be possible to make a single
> joystick driver, maybe replacing winejoystick.drv that would build
> only the platform code that is relevant.
I'm OK with that, but I don't think my opinion actually matters.

> but before I do another big chunk of work I am seeking some
> community buy-in and not just discuss with with Alexandre. I
> understand if the USB driver path gets actually fleshed out and we
> try to support Joysticks via that then all this separate driver
> work would fall away and be replaced.
What do you mean with USB? Have support for USB devices and talk to
the raw USB device? In a way loading Windows joystick drivers or write
our own?

If this is the plan, does this work well in practise? The permissions
for accessing a USB device and an input device may be different. There
are non-USB joysticks. (Gameport, and nowadays hard drives have
acceleration sensors that get exposed as joysticks, but this may work
via fake USB devices)

There's another issue that may be related: When I play a game with a
joystick I usually don't touch my mouse or keyboard. That results in
the monitor going into standby after the standby timeout expired. I
suspect that d3d is supposed to disable screensavers (there are flags
that essenially say don't disable my screensaver), though maybe the X
server is supposed to read the joystick in some way and recognize that
I am still using the computer.