notroller

notroller

notroller exposes a virtual uinput gamepad, allowing you to control games running on your machine using your smartphone's web browser.

This exists for demo/proof-of-concept purposes only and is filled with bugs, missing functionality, and broken dreams. Truth be told, this is really not a great substitute for an old-fasioned, plastic injection-moulded physical controller!

Disclaimer

This is a toy project I put together as proof-of-concept. Apologies for the mess, and use at your own risk.

Do not use this on an untrusted network, as it allows remote clients to send inputs to the host.

Requirements

Linux and Go 1.1 or later, as well as uinput-devel (or your distribution's equivalent) for the C bindings. Run go get -a to fetch all other module dependencies.

Ensure your user has permissions to read /dev/uinput - on most Linux systems this is a simple matter of adding your user to the input group (or whatever group /dev/uinput belongs to on your system.)

(If you fancy adding support for another OS, it's a simple case of implementing the interface defined by input.go - see input_linux.go for the Linux implementation.)

Usage

Running this code exposes an HTTP (port 5764 by default) that allows remote clients to pass input to your machine. Clients can put http://<host>:5764 into their web browser to select a gamepad port and a gamepad interface to use.

notroller hosts an HTTP server on port 5764 on all network interfaces.

notroller --help lists all options.

It should work with any game/application - you can use jstest to verify that inputs are being interpreted correctly as a gamepad device.

Notes

There are three types of controller: "Retro", "Retro (analog)" and "Wheel"

The Retro controller looks a bit like an 8-bit controller from the 80s. The "analog" variant interprets positions on the DPad as continuous values (like an analog stick) as opposed to the non-analog variant that only supports Up/Down/Left/Right.

The Wheel controller looks like a steering wheel and uses the orientation sensors of your device.