Knowledge Base

I recently got the urge to connect my old USB gamepads and play retro games with them. (Specifically, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 if you care). I spent a week whipping up a small GUI interface to do that.

Dependencies

On Devuan-like systems use packages:

• python3-sdl2
• python3-pygame

How to use

You may attach the USB gamepad before or after running this program. For best results, do not connect multiple gamepads at a time.

Add new configs to config.py, with a simple declarative syntax that is documented briefly with the two given examples. Feel free to share additional configs with this upstream. Gather aliases for attached gamepads with the helper files in directory extras/.

Upstream

The upstream for the project is at https://bgstack15.ddns.net/cgit/pyjstest/ or https://gitlab.com/bgstack15/pyjstest/.

Reason for existence

I wanted to build a simple input-reaction program, and test my python skills, and learn some sdl2. SDL2 has python3 bindings available, but most of the documentation on the Internet is for the C library.

Alternatives

For basic input display on cli and gtk displays, use these utilities.

• jstest
• jstest-gtk

Improvements

I need to redesign this to handle multiple attached devices. Right now, it supports only one.