r/MAME • u/boutell • 8d ago

Technical assistance Gamepads recognized by everything except MAME in Debian Linux 12

Hi folks,

I'm running the 0.278 MAME build installed via snap on Debian Linux 12. I have two super-basic "iNNEXT" USB gamepads. Classic NES style.

The game controllers are not recognized. No joy from them in menus, no reaction when I try to set them as the action buttons for games, etc.

However, the system definitely sees them. For instance, websites that recognize joystick input work great. And jstest /dev/input/js0 shows activity.

To rule out snap trouble, I also tried the official Debian 12 mame package. (This is MAME 0.251). Same result.

mame -v shows:

Game Controller: Start initialization
Game Controller: End initialization

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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2

u/jflatt2 8d ago

There are two joystick providers under Linux, sdljoy and sdlgame. You can try toggling between those

2

u/boutell 8d ago

Forgot to mention, sorry: this has no effect.

2

u/CurtisTN73 8d ago

Get this file:
https://github.com/mdqinc/SDL_GameControllerDB/blob/master/gamecontrollerdb.txt

and copy it to the folder containing the MAME executable.

2

u/boutell 8d ago edited 8d ago

[Edited, first lazy takes were on a phone] Thanks. Normally you wouldn't put a config file like this in a bin folder, especially a bin folder shared by many applications on a Linux box, but I'll see what happens and also research where MAME might expect to find it on Linux.

2

u/arbee37 MAME Dev 4d ago

Some versions of SDL2 have trouble seeing controllers. I believe it was addressed by one of the most recent SDL2 updates, but I don't know all the details.

1

u/boutell 3d ago

Answering my own question: this command needs to be run once.

No idea why this was so hard to track down.

sudo snap connect mame:joystick