Virpil controller support

[cyb3rd4d]

Hello dear Proton community

I recently bought a Virpil controller (a Constellation Alpha) and it was recognized as a game pad by my Steam games (Elite Dangerous and Star Wars Squadrons). I tried a lot of different versions of Proton with those games, official, experimental and also from GE.

I was pretty sure that was a Proton (or at least a Steam) issue, and not a Wine issue, because my controller works in Star Citizen that I run through Lutris. I only had to open the wine control panel for my game, run the game controllers settings and move my controller from the xinput section to the "connected" one (the first section of the window settings).

But for my Steam games, I tried a lot of things I found on wine forums, Reddit etc... mainly tweeking regedit keys with no luck, until I found this post: https://www.reddit.com/user/xatrekak/comments/12hnz0d/fixing_vkb_and_virpil_hotas_running_on_linux/ which fixed my issue.

Here is the content of the post:

So there is an issue with the VIRPIL and VKB products being detected as xbox controllers when Running them on Linux, particularly with Elite: Dangerous. Here is how I fixed it.

After weeks of trouble shooting this is the workarounds that I came up with. Hopefully this helps.

This is the standard documented fix:

Open regedit in your WINEPREFIX

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\winebus

Create a new DWORD named "Enable SDL" with value 0

Create a new DWORD named "Map Controllers" with value 0

In theory the two values above should prevent wine from mapping your devices to xinput. In my experience this alone does not resolve the problem, so if you still have issues then we need to remove every trace of xinput from the registry without completely nuking the controller (which is what happens when you indiscriminately delete the PID/VID entries from the registry) so also complete the following steps:

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\WINEXINPUT

Delete every folder heading under this

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\WINEBUS

Expand every heading that matches the VID/PID of your HOTAS (execute lsusb from the terminal to find your VID/PID)

you should see a long ass folder with a name similar to 273&03000000443300009043000011010000&0&0

Change these key values

Name "Service": change the data from xinput -> winehid

Name "DeviceDesc": change the data from: Wine XInput compatible device -> Wine HID compatible device

Name "CompatiableIds": The data field is a multi line input field. delete everything except: WINEBUS\WINE_COMP_HID

Here are some other things related to my setup that some people have found to be necessary and some have had luck without needing:

Running from lutris instead of though Steam/proton

wine version >= lutris-GE-Proton7-27-x86_64

I didn't had to run the game through Lutris though. After applying the regedit changes, my controller axes and buttons became available in the Elite Dangerous settings.

I really hope this feedback will be useful to improve the Proton support of Virpil controllers.

[kisak-valve]

Hello @cyb3rd4d, the workaround you've shared is a pretty strong hint that your issue is with libSDL not knowing about your controller, not Proton.

Bypassing libSDL is not a practical option to improve support for your device. Instead, take a look at how your controller interacts with SDL's test utilities and maybe a native Linux game that uses SDL for controller input, see how it behaves, and file an upstream issue report with libSDL with your findings.

[cyb3rd4d]

Hello @kisak-valve, thank you for your reply!

I just installed the packages sdl-jstest and sdl2-jstest from the AUR and I tested my joystick with those two utilities, the buttons and the axes behaves correctly.

I also forgot to mention that my joystick works out of the box on Windows in Elite Dangerous.

[kakra]

Do you guys have VID/PIDs of the Virpil controller so I could add it to my PR ValveSoftware/wine#197?

[cyb3rd4d]

Thank you @kakra, I found 3344:412f

❯ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 3344:412f Leaguer Microelectronics (LME) R-VPC Stick MT-50CM2

[kakra]

To make it work, try the following steps (replace 0x3344/0x412F by your specific USB device ID):

1. Make sure, the wine-proton prefix isn't running (stop the game)
2. In the game properties, change your launch options to PROTON_ENABLE_HIDRAW=0x3344/0x412F %command%
3. Go to the compatdata directory of the affected game and create a backup of pfx/system.reg at some other location
4. Open pfx/system.reg in a text editor and remove all whole sections which contain values or names with these:
   • lines containing both vid_3344 and pid_412f
   • lines containing both VID_3344 and PID_412F

Ensure that you have deployed udev rules for your controller. You should find a file in /etc/udev/rules.d containing something like these:

# Leaguer Microelectronics (LME) R-VPC Stick MT-50CM2
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="3344", ATTRS{idProduct}=="412f", MODE="0660", TAG+="uaccess"

(if not, create 60-steam-input.rules with those lines and reboot)

Now start the game: Your Virpil should now be properly detected.

If this works, I'll add your controller to my list of patches.

[kakra]

Thank you @kakra, I found 3344:412f

Do you have just one stick and this is the right grip? Or is it a compound device having both throttle and joystick combined into a single USB device?

[cyb3rd4d]

It's not a compound device, just a base (MongoosT-50CM2) and a grip (Constellation ALPHA-R).

To make it work, try the following steps:

Can you wait until Saturday or Sunday? I don't have a lot of free time during the week.

[cyb3rd4d]

OK I followed your procedure, I just uninstall the game and reinstalled it before just to make sure to have a clean environment. The Proton version I used is 8.0-3.

The udev rule did not exist so I created the file and I rebooted before launching the game, my Virpil was detected with all its buttons and axes! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

But isn't it too restrictive to target my product ID to determine if it's a Virpil controller? Shouldn't we only target the vendor ID?

[kakra]

But isn't it too restrictive to target my product ID to determine if it's a Virpil controller? Shouldn't we only target the vendor ID?

Yeah it is restrictive but OTOH, what if Virpil made other type of devices, too, which should not be handled in that way? It probably needs a more generic approach, like looking at the HID descriptor itself and identifying some common traits of the controller, i.e., my VKB has 128 buttons in the descriptor. So if it would be the VKB VID with 128 buttons, we could say it's a joystick. This may be oversimplified but I think one gets the idea.

For the moment, it would be useful to also know the PID if the left grip. Any chance you could get that from somewhere, maybe a friend?

[cyb3rd4d]

Ok I understand. It’s still a great improvement for the Linux gamers! Le sam. 2 sept. 2023 à 14:13, Kai Krakow ***@***.***(mailto:Le sam. 2 sept. 2023 à 14:13, Kai Krakow <<a href=)> a écrit :

…

> But isn't it too restrictive to target my product ID to determine if it's a Virpil controller? Shouldn't we only target the vendor ID? Yeah it is restrictive but OTOH, what if Virpil makes other type of devices, too, which should not be handled in that way? It probably needs a more generic approach, like looking at the HID descriptor itself and identifying some common traits of the controller, i.e., my VKB has 128 buttons in the descriptor. So if it would be the VKB VID with 128 buttons, we could say it's a joystick. This may be oversimplified but I think one gets the idea. — Reply to this email directly, [view it on GitHub](#6839 (comment)), or [unsubscribe](https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACJOGWKORCLWG7D6U25PFTXYMPIFANCNFSM6AAAAAAZBTMJV4). You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[stoertebecker]

I just received my Constellation Alpha-R and a WarBRD-D Base from Virpil and was following the instuctions here. Creating a udev rule and adding the PROTON_ENABLE_HIDRAW environment variable did the trick, my joystick works perfectly fine with proton 8 in DCS World (haven't tried other games yet). Thank you very much for this info :)

Playing around with the virpil software, i noticed something: the device got a new product ID several times.
I'm not 100% sure anymore but i think first time it happened when i created a new profile for it, second time when i did the firmware update and a third time when i tried the "split by 32 buttons" option on the profile page in the software. Again, not 100% sure but on this third time it might have changed to the ID that it had in the beginning.

This 32 button split option says that this could help if a game doesn't understand input devices with more than 32 buttons. I'm not sure what it is supposed to do tho. Sounds like it would split the device into several virtual 32 button devices maybe?

The Vendor ID stays the same tho (3344).

Anyways... since my device did change the PID i doubt that checking the PID is a good option (maybe cyb3rd4d can confirm this change of the product ID if you play around in the virpil software?).

I only have this Virpil device but i doubt that Virpil has any devices that should act like an xbox controller. But i also don't know if it would be a good idea to simply enable HIDRAW on all devices with VID 3344.