I think this is a little bit overkill as well. Gaming APIs can exist
outside the kernel, in fact, they should. The problem here is not
that developers don't have access to gaming APIs available for linux,
it's that there's too many, but that's both the burden and blessing of
an open, "free" source environment.
There is one annoying thing though I recently came across.
Calibrating gamepads and joysticks in Linux, it seems there's no
universal way to do this. There is libjsw, which some programs use,
and SDL, which I believe uses the /dev/* interfaces directly. jscal
and jscalibrator both only apply to programs that use libjsw(I
believe)
In the end, joystick calibration code is often added directly to
applications that use joysticks, instead of being determined at a
lower level. If anything, perhaps there should be a way to set null
zones, dead zones, and so on through the input interfaces? I recently
had to edit gens' source code, for example. My axis on my gamepad
outputs values from -32767 to +32767. Values +-3000 are basically
garbage. The controller is _WAY_ too sensitive. Gens only throws out
values +-500, so there's a problem. The gamepad was being so
sensitive that I could not properly define gamepad buttons for gens,
because every time I hit a button the analog sticks would vibrate and
fly to values +-3000 or so, and there is no universally way to
calibrate joysticks that I'm aware of.
Maybe something like _THIS_ should be added to the kernel? Or is
there already, and I'm just being ignorant?
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