Installing a custom USB controller for Frets on Fire on Ubuntu
Last year, I made a custom USB controller out of a piece of wood and a broken joystick for Frets on Fire, a Guitar Hero type game for Windows and Linux. Since I moved to Ubuntu Linux, I wanted to get the controller working again. Here's what I did:
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'sudo apt-get install joystick' to install the joystick software
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'sudo apt-get install joy2key' to install the conversion software
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'sudo ln -s /dev/input/js0 /dev/js0' to create a soft link to the device driver. I think this may be skipped (see last step).
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Created a '.joy2keyrc' file (see below)
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'joy2key -dev /dev/js0 -config fretsonfire'. I think maybe '-dev /dev/input/js0' works as well, but it hasn't been consistent for me. Oftentimes, I have to press control-C to exit out of this program when it says 'select a window'...however, it still seems to work fine.
The contents of .joy2keyrc are:
START fretsonfire -thresh 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -X -buttons q w e r t
I then ran Frets on Fire, and configured the 'key' settings for the appropriate frets.
I'm not sure if the instructions above are really perfect, but they worked enough so I could rock a bit!
Update: I've been having problems getting /dev/input/js0 to show up, even if I plug in and unplug the guitar (joystick). It seems if I go up and search for new hardware, none is found. However, this seems to sometimes trigger the driver (or whatever) to be loaded. Maybe there's a better way.
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