Will multiplayer be easier on Pyra?

[worzyl]

Hello there.

Having had my Pandora for a few years, my main gripe was that I could never get joysticks/joypads working on the Pandora for some multiplayer action.
Information on how to get these working was never concrete with people claiming they got it working, then when asked to give detailed info on how they managed it, they were never heard from again
I always though that it would of been excellent to have been made a sticky on the board as many people had asked about this question...

Anyway, moving on.....

How easy will it be to set up multiplayer gaming on the prya? How much compatibility will it offer in terms of controllers and multiplayer on one machine , as well as online gaming experiences?

I'm also interested to know how many people use their current pandora for multiplayer gaming.

 

[bzar]

Isn't that entirely up to the game you're playing?

 

[TrashyMG]

In the sense of software bzar is right, you will need to bind external controller controls manually and not every game is as accommodating as others in that regards. I guess one area it may be easier is all the USB ports will work normally, on the Pandora it was a hard concept for many people to grasp that the normal sized USB port could only run USB 2.0 devices and they need a HUB to use USB 1.1 devices like most controllers, keyboards and mice.

 

[edgex004]

I was probably one of those people. It took me a while (years) to finally add my OUYA controller "how to" to the wiki.

Like bzar and TrashyMG said, it depends on the program. Some, like Mupen, the .EMU emulators, and PCSX ReARMed, have a highly customizable config or set up menu that makes multiplayer very easy and also makes switching between external and Pandora controls a breeze. Other programs, like Not Tetris and any games that require binding in QJoyPad, work well enough, but are a bit cumbersome even after they are initially set up. Many do not have the ability to save controller configs and need to be adjusted each time you switch between an external controller and Pandora controls.

If you are attempting to set up external controllers again, I'll be happy to help (for real). I put together some customizations that help make the process more automatic, but they don't work perfectly yet.

I don't expect Pyra to be much different. However, @bzar , will FunKeyMonkey be usable to map input from external gamepads? If so, I wonder if it could help alleviate the Pandora's issue that currently some games grab inputs prior to QJoyPad being able to remap them (something to do with SDL?) and therefore some of my special bindings that I use for navigation/switching between controller profiles stop working. This would greatly alleviate the control issue for me, as at least there would be a brute force method to keep some shortcuts and scripts mapped to certain buttons on the external controller. It could potentially allow for a more fluid external controller experience.

 

[ible]

funkeymonkey can map anything to anywhere.

i've used it to take input from external gamepads and virtually-push various keys on my laptop...

 

[levi]

Edit: Ah, I guess you're talking about local multiplayer. Yes, I also had some difficulty finding games that let me configure the keys to use my bluetooth controller.

 

[edgex004]

funkeymonkey can map anything to anywhere.

i've used it to take input from external gamepads and virtually-push various keys on my laptop...

Has anyone been using it on Pandora? I might need to give it a shot this weekend to see if it can improve my TV-out set up at all.

 

[bzar]

Has anyone been using it on Pandora? I might need to give it a shot this weekend to see if it can improve my TV-out set up at all.

It should work there, though because of it being written in C++11 you need GCC >=4.9 to compile it and then a reasonably recent version of libstdc++ to run it.

 

[worzyl]

I was probably one of those people. It took me a while (years) to finally add my OUYA controller "how to" to the wiki.

Like bzar and TrashyMG said, it depends on the program. Some, like Mupen, the .EMU emulators, and PCSX ReARMed, have a highly customizable config or set up menu that makes multiplayer very easy and also makes switching between external and Pandora controls a breeze. Other programs, like Not Tetris and any games that require binding in QJoyPad, work well enough, but are a bit cumbersome even after they are initially set up. Many do not have the ability to save controller configs and need to be adjusted each time you switch between an external controller and Pandora controls.

If you are attempting to set up external controllers again, I'll be happy to help (for real). I put together some customizations that help make the process more automatic, but they don't work perfectly yet.

I don't expect Pyra to be much different. However, @bzar , will FunKeyMonkey be usable to map input from external gamepads? If so, I wonder if it could help alleviate the Pandora's issue that currently some games grab inputs prior to QJoyPad being able to remap them (something to do with SDL?) and therefore some of my special bindings that I use for navigation/switching between controller profiles stop working. This would greatly alleviate the control issue for me, as at least there would be a brute force method to keep some shortcuts and scripts mapped to certain buttons on the external controller. It could potentially allow for a more fluid external controller experience.

This would be very helpful for the community. I'm looking at arcade emulators like FBA in which I tried using QJoyPad but couldn't get it working.
I think it would be helpful to have a sticky, something like "Post Your Local Multiplayer Controller Set Ups", in which people post their set up in a step by step guide, for whatever emulator they are using whether it be FBA/Mame, Amiga, 8 bit or others.

funkeymonkey can map anything to anywhere.

i've used it to take input from external gamepads and virtually-push various keys on my laptop...

These are the sort of answers I have seen many, many times when asking about controller set ups in that it's difficult to get concrete info.
Yes - it works on a laptop. What about the Pandora?

It should work there, though because of it being written in C++11 you need GCC >=4.9 to compile it and then a reasonably recent version of libstdc++ to run it.

Has anybody tried this?

 

[ptitSeb]

It should compile with codeblocks (current version has gcc 5.2).

 

[bzar]

These are the sort of answers I have seen many, many times when asking about controller set ups in that it's difficult to get concrete info.
Yes - it works on a laptop. What about the Pandora?

The method is directly tied to how Linux does input handling, so there's no reason I can see it shouldn't work. As long as an input device driver creates an event file under /dev/input it can be opened with FunKeyMonkey. Pandora's game controls do this, any joysticks, mice, keyboards and gamepads I've tried do this. Even power buttons do this. As long as the output device can be represented as a uinput device, it can be made with the ready tools in FunKeyMonkey.

The downside to this level of flexibility is that the modules that translate inputs to outputs need at this point be programmed as dynamically loadable plugins. There's no nice GUI or configuration file if one of the existing modules doesn't do what you want.

 

[ible]

yes it requires a bit of getting your hands dirty with C++ coding, but there are a few simple examples which you can base your controls off of.

 

[edgex004]

Well that might be a bit of a fun project for me. I'll take a look and post in the FunKeyMonkey thread if I come across any road blocks. If I get anything working I'll publish my plugins. I use OUYA and Gamecube controllers. Unfortunately those might not be the most useful for others. However, I do highly recommend using OUYA controllers with the Pandora. The trackpad maps the mouse by default and works well with openbox.

This would be very helpful for the community. I'm looking at arcade emulators like FBA in which I tried using QJoyPad but couldn't get it working.
I think it would be helpful to have a sticky, something like "Post Your Local Multiplayer Controller Set Ups", in which people post their set up in a step by step guide, for whatever emulator they are using whether it be FBA/Mame, Amiga, 8 bit or others.

I haven't used FBA or at least never got it working, but my external controllers were easy to set up with PanMAME if I'm remembering correctly. I can help walk you through that one if you come across any problems. I'll try to continue putting game-specific instructions on the wiki, but a sticky thread would work fine too.

Take a look at the "Program Specific Compatibility" section of the controller wiki page. Anything marked "yes" in the "Button Mapping" should be able to be configured without using QJoyPad.

ptitSeb fixed a bug in the .emu emulators that made saving controller profiles work fine for me, so if there are any 8-bit systems from that family of emulators I recommend you try them first for external controllers. Also look at the thread for those emulators, as there is an export I've been meaning to try out that should prevent the Pandora from going to sleep. If it works, I'd recommend adding it to the start script, as external gamepads do not currently prevent the Pandora from power saving.

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

On topic: What's about FightCade?

 

[LTStone]

Fightcade would be awesome!!

 

[Rockthesmurf]

It should work there, though because of it being written in C++11 you need GCC >=4.9 to compile it and then a reasonably recent version of libstdc++ to run it.

With regards to libstdc++ versions; this has felt a bit messy to me on Pandora (I'm coming from Windows), and I'm not sure if that is due to lack of NAND space or whether it is a more fundamental Linux problem. On Windows you have Side-by-Side Assemblies, so when an application runs, Windows DLL Loader will automatically use the correct version of the runtime. If the user doesn't have the correct runtime they can install the relevant runtime and then t is there and available for all programs. Does Linux have something like that? It would be nice if using the latest GCC/Clang/etc. 'just worked' and didn't require the packager to include a load of extra system libraries into their PND (or whatever contained the Pyra uses).

 

[ptitSeb]

It's not really different here.

It's like if you try to run a software written with VisualStudio 2015 with only the VisualStudio 8.0 Runtime installed... I wont work (and the contrary will not work too).

 

[bzar]

With regards to libstdc++ versions; this has felt a bit messy to me on Pandora (I'm coming from Windows), and I'm not sure if that is due to lack of NAND space or whether it is a more fundamental Linux problem. On Windows you have Side-by-Side Assemblies, so when an application runs, Windows DLL Loader will automatically use the correct version of the runtime. If the user doesn't have the correct runtime they can install the relevant runtime and then t is there and available for all programs. Does Linux have something like that? It would be nice if using the latest GCC/Clang/etc. 'just worked' and didn't require the packager to include a load of extra system libraries into their PND (or whatever contained the Pyra uses).

Should be better on pyra since we'll have a reasonably up-to-date repository to depend on and hopefully enough NAND space to hold most common libraries without trouble.