Thursday, November 27, 2008

HOWTO: Get Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 Working on Ubuntu 8.04

I just had to jump through a few hoops to get the Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 gamepad to work on my Ubuntu installation, and I wanted to write down how I got it working. This is mainly so I will have a reminder, if I ever have to do this again in the future, but it could help someone.

First, when I plugged the thing in, it was already recognized, which I could see via the dmesg and lsusb commands.


From dmesg (after pluggin in the USB receiver for the cordless controller)
[ 933.085195] usb 5-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 933.094885] usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 933.151596] input: Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input12
[ 933.203335] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Gamepad [Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2



From lsusb
Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:c219 Logitech, Inc.


So, from this, I knew at least some default drivers or something were working. This "hid" stuff and the uhci_hcd relates to the driver module, I believe.

I installed jscalibrator, but it didn't recognize any input, and the GUI was poorly presented with words running off the left side of the page and whatnot.

I then installed joystick with
sudo apt-get install joystick


Then I used the following two commands:
jscal /dev/input/js0
jstest /dev/input/js0


I could then see feedback in the jstest program when using any of the buttons on the gamepad.

After all of this, the dpad and analog directional sticks would not work in znes, although all other buttons would. After unplugging the receiver and plugging it into a different USB port, however, all buttons worked in znes. Now I just need to get sound working, but I wanted to log my steps for getting the gamepad working first.

UPDATE: 11-30-2008

I was able to get sound working the other day by installing this package: libsdl1.2-alsa. Then running the command

zsnes -ad sdl


The normal start command wasn't giving me sound. With the '-ad sdl' argument, the sound was there, but it was crackly (yes, I used that word). Setting the sample rate to 48000 seems to have solved that problem, however. Also, I checked out this forum topic on the Ubuntu forums, and acoustibop mentions installing an sdl library package that includes all the different sound architectures (including alsa and oss).

As a general improvement for sound in games, try installing libsdl1.2debian-all. This will remove libsdl1.2-alsa but don't worry, support for ALSA will be reinstalled as part of libsdl1.2debian-all.


So, I did that as well, and now the command

zsnes


by itself launches the emulator with sound enabled, and everything seems to work just fine.

2 comments:

Amillennialist said...

Thanks for sharing your work.

I'm trying to get a Cordless Rumblepad 2 working with Madden 2003 in Ubuntu through WINE (it wouldn't save games in Vista; some odd, "-1.00mb," "insufficient space error").

So far, everything but the Rumblepad 2's calibration is working fine, including seeing the proper hard drive space.

Regards,

Amillennialist

Amillennialist said...

Another thanks.

Got the first Rumblepad working.

Any ideas on getting a second one to work?

Regards,

Amillennialist