# Questions about the Joystick driver & API



## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Oct 14, 2019)

Hello all. I'll keep this brief:

1. Who's responsible for the joystick driver?
2. Has there been any movement on the joystick API within the past 2.5 decades?
3. Does anyone know of anything that would actually break if the joystick driver & API were replaced?


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## stratact (Nov 5, 2019)

Hi there,

I'm not sure how to answer all of your questions but if you're looking for a way to use joysticks in FreeBSD, a close friend of mine implemented `joytran` which is worth a look: https://www.freshports.org/emulators/joytran/


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## A. D. Sharpe Sr. (Dec 2, 2019)

stratact said:


> Hi there,
> 
> I'm not sure how to answer all of your questions but if you're looking for a way to use joysticks in FreeBSD, a close friend of mine implemented `joytran` which is worth a look: https://www.freshports.org/emulators/joytran/


Thank you. However, I was merely trying to verify whether or not anyone was using the current (very old) joystick driver that's in the kernel. Now that I see no one is doing it, I'm going to work on creating a native joystick/gamepad system for FreeBSD. This will consist of a USB HID joystick driver in kernel space (right beside the HID mouse & keyboard drivers) & a joystick/gamepad library for enumerating, selecting, & reading joysticks/gamepads connected to the system. From there, I'll try to attach it to SDL's input system.


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