GRS Star Wars flight yoke issues

[cool_factor]

I used mame230 and ran ./mamearcade -v >joy.txt and this was part of the output, the whole output is further up in this thread.

[cool_factor]

No pressure to mess with the ARpiCADE_5 stuff if it isn't convenient.

You can replace 'joystick' in the dmesg | grep command with anything 'usb' may find what you're after. It's just looking through the kernel startup output, shouldn't hurt if you try a few things in the search *(one at a time).

EDIT having seen your new post. (is that output from MAME rather than the Linux kernel?)
What happens when the yoke is in mouse mode as per the instructions leaflet you posted? It may be worth having a look at the MAME output when it's in each of it's modes to see what (if anything) changes.

Makes no difference. It must have something to do with the way it loads itself, I'm guessing it's seen before the OS is.

[cool_factor]

Out of curiosity... do you still have ARpiCADE_5 on SD? If so does the yoke have the same behaviour on it when tested on the same Pi4? ARpiCADE_5 uses a different GPIO joystick method so may behave differently to the mk_arcade_joystick driver.

I get this isn't a solution for you if it works but I'm curious. If I had to guess it is probably just as bad going by the hotkeys issue...

Burned sd with v5, 4 ROMs, star wars, star trek, missile command, ghouls and ghosts. Flight yoke, spinner, trackball, joystick. With no flight yoke plugged in, 100% functions. Shut down and restart with flight yoke plugged in does exact same thing, throws controls off. I'm convinced that this flight yoke is seen before OS starts. Just cant prove it...

[dee2eR]

I don't know what to suggest. I would have imagined the mouse mode was all you needed to use but if the yoke is still a joystick no matter what then I don't know... I'm guessing you have already talked to the yoke manufacturer about this and they don't have any suggestions(?), you cannot be the only person with this kind of issue... surely.

About the only work around I can think of is to set all the controls up again in all the emulators you use while the yoke is attached. IE: If the yoke always becomes js0 tell MAME to use js1 for player 1 instead, etc. Bit of a pain in the butt to re-do all the controls but I can't think of anything else.

[cool_factor]

I "think" this may work, I stumbled on it while searching. I just dont know how to implement this.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1595666

it talks about making a rule

this is the info needed for the rule I believe:

ATTRS{idVendor}=="0483", ATTRS{idProduct}=="5750", MODE="0666"
or
ENV{ID_VENDOR}=="Baolian_industry_Co._Ltd.", ENV{ID_MODEL}=="BL_flight_yoke_#1"


ran jstest /dev/input/js0 and so forth:

tested and got these results below:

js0
joystick (Baolian Industry Co. Ltd. BL Flight yoke#1) 2 axis x, y 15 buttons

js1
joystick (Baolian Industry Co. Ltd. BL Flight yoke#1) 2 axis x, y 3 buttons

js2
joystick (GPIO Controller1) 2 axis x,y 9 buttons

js3
joystick (GPIO Controller2) 2 axis x,y 9 buttons

js4
joystick (xbox Gamepad (userspace driver)) 4 axis x, y, gas, brake 15 buttons

nothing above js5

Does this seem correct? I assume that js0 js1 js2 js3 are all supposed to be for the arpicade correct?

So would the rule need to be that the flight yoke is assigned to js4 and js5 since its seen as 2 joysticks?

No the mfg is 0 help, they support retropie, arcade1up, windows, etc, they asked whats an arpicade?

[dee2eR]

If they support RetroPie using GPIO controls with the mk_arcade_joystick driver (which is available on RetroPie) it should be the same as on ARpiCADE (both RetroPie and ARpiCADE are based on RaspiOS (previously called Raspbian)).

Yes, normally JS0 is GPIO Controller 1 (player 1), JS1 is GPIO Controller 2 (player 2), and JS2 is the hotkeys system (using xboxdrv).

The UDEV rules as per the Ubuntu post may work. Unfortunately the post is 15 years old so there may have been changes to Linux in the meantime that could have broken this method. Following the example in the post you can create the file with the terminal command:
sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/73-persistent-joystick.rules

Then you can add the rules, probably something like:
KERNEL=="js?", ENV{ID_VENDOR}=="Baolian_industry_Co._Ltd.", ENV{ID_MODEL}=="BL_flight_yoke_#1", NAME="input/js3"
KERNEL=="js?", ENV{ID_VENDOR}=="Baolian_industry_Co._Ltd.", ENV{ID_MODEL}=="BL_flight_yoke_#1", NAME="input/js4"

Unfortunately the yoke appears as 2 joysticks with exactly the same info so it may not work as intended, assuming this is the way to go.

[cool_factor]

I've emailed a detailed report to the mfg. Also, I think I know why it shows up twice. Reading this entire post again it seems it's seen twice because by using button pushes you're disabling either mouse mode or gamepad mode but it's still seen by linux. Explains why the jstest numbers work on one but not the other and when it that mode movement is seen on corresponding js numbers. Hope that makes sense, it was a late night.

[dee2eR]

Just adding the idea from our emails the other night for anyone playing along at home.

You may be able to add the yoke to /lib/udev/rules.d/51-these-are-not-joysticks-rm.rules and then use it as a mouse.