Arch Linux

Wild Penguin

Member

Registered: 2015-03-19

Posts: 347

Wine and direct USB access status currently

Hi,

[background]:

I just bought a game controller (Steam controller started to drift, WIP to get to a hot air station to change the module). I got this controller: 8bitdo Pro 2 Bluetooth. It's a nice controller with hall effect sticks - with one ergonomic (opinionated) snag: it's handles are more straight than many other controllers. Depending on your stance, you might or might not like the different angle your hands will be in. The gamepad works as is itself on Linux.

Now, information on how one actually uses the features (special button features, profiles, adjusting axises etc.) on the controller is scattered. One has the choice to user an Android application (which request location permissions and does not work), an IOs application or a Windows application. The Windows application works fine in a VM, but that is a tedious thing to start just to do some settings.

[/background]:

The software does start in Wine, but obviously can not talk to the gamepad (since it requires raw USB access?). I know direct USB access has been previously a missing (seldom requested nor needed) feature, but there has been some work done recently-ish.

Now, I've adopted an udev rule to change the device node permissions as suggested here. I can see the udev rule is working, as

$ ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/014 
crw-rw-r-- 1 root ville 189, 13 29. 5. 13:55 /dev/bus/usb/001/014

Their software does not recognize the pad, it just waits for it indefinitely.

Now, does anyone have any idea are these efforts in vain, should I just boot a VM every time I want to adjust some settings?

Or, perhaps some kernel modules have clinged on to the device? I tried to blacklist hid_generic but had no luck so far. I suppose to have any chance of success, I'd also need to make sure nothing else besides wine is talking to this USB device, but I have no idea how to make sure that is the case.

Cheers!