Newbie looking for joystick driver advice

NTDEV
1

Hey folks,

I recently bought a Chinese Flydigi Vader 4 Pro controller which seems very nice. The hardware is excellent, but the software not so much... The controller comes with several extra buttons that can only be mapped to existing face buttons -- no remapping to keyboard inputs, additional simulated controller buttons beyond what a standard Xbox controller provides, etc. I am a newbie with some light coding experience. Unfortunately, none of my exp. relates to low-level software/hardware.

So, the questions remains, can someone point me in the right direction on how-to take the driver Flydigi designed and write a new software stack on top of it? Maybe even design a new driver, if required, by reverse engineering or mating theirs to a new stack? In short, while the gamepad has several nifty additional buttons, they can only be remapped to the confines of Xinput (Xbox controller limited button selection), while I want to be able to map them to new buttons.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate any guidance to get started.

2

Does the device actually require a driver, or does it just plug-and-play? I assume it is USB. Most USB gamepads do not require a custom driver at all.

And to be brutally honest, kernel programming is no place for beginners. A mistake in an app causes the app to stop. A mistake in a kernel driver crashes your whole system, sometimes with damage.