Sunday, December 22, 2013

using your HitBox or other Toodles Cthulhu input device on Linux

I'm something of a fighting games enthusiast, and I've been getting a bit more into it in recent months.

For the discerning player, there are all kinds of interesting input devices ("fightsticks") on offer these days -- you can buy them from big companies like MadCatz or Hori or Capcom, or from a more boutique outfit, or you can do a custom one -- parts are available for building your own or modding existing sticks. There are robust online communities around the whole enterprise, and at least two online stores for buying parts. Fascinating!

I got really excited about, and went ahead and bought, the HitBox fight stick. It's unusual in that it has no joystick; you input directions with buttons. With some practice, you can get really crisp, precise input, which is pretty important in fighting games. It took some getting used to, but now I'm a big fan -- playing games feels like typing, and my thumbs don't get sore.

The HitBox I got is supposed to work both PS3 and PC. It took a small amount of fiddling to make it go on Linux, but it works great now. This approach will probably also work for other devices based on the Toodles Cthulhu PCB.

the problem: the stick seems to immediately disappear...

So here's the problem: when I plugged in my HitBox on USB, it seemed as though it wasn't detected.
I checked dmesg, though, and it turned out that it was detected by the kernel, but then it immediately disconnected itself.

Mysterious shell script from the Internet to the rescue!

Then I found this thread and this shell script. The script apparently convinces the PCB not to disconnect by reading from it as soon as it's connected (the theory is that the PCB tries switching into XBox 360 mode? Unclear...), and it detects the stick by watching /dev/input/by-id.

Unfortunately, the HitBox had a different device name from the one in that original shell script, so I had to figure out where exactly it was showing up in /dev/input/by-id.

Here's an updated version that works with my HitBox.

Finding the filename for the /dev entry for the HitBox was slightly tricky, because how do you discover the filename of a very fleeting file? It disappears as soon as the PCB decides it should disconnect! Here's the command I used:
$ until ls /dev/input/by-id | grep -m 1 Toodles; do : sleep 0.2 ; done
And that helpfully output:
/dev/input/by-id/usb-Toodles_2008_HitBox_Edition_Cthulhu+-event-joystick
which I popped into that earlier script, and everything worked! And now: my (weird) fightstick works whether I'm playing on the PS3 or on a SNES emulator on my computer!

Watch for unnervingly accurate dragon punches and electric wind god fists.