I recently rebooted development of a project I tried to develop for the Ludum Dare 20 contest held in April 2011, the theme of which was “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!”

As the project will require a controller with an analogue stick to play I’ve begun to develop a utility to interrogate the capabilities of various controllers; and, as I feel that the SDL2 documentation is lacking with regards to the joystick support offered by that library, I’ve posted – in addition to an executable of that utility for Mac OS X (and I want to release executables for additional platforms – the Raspberry Pi in particular – in the future) – the source code to that utility to GitHub for the benefit both of myself and of others.

Note that to use the utility you will need to have SDL2_image – in addition to SDL2 – installed.

Amongst the changes in version 2.0 of the utility are that:

• the utility now features support for multiple controllers;
• the utility now features detection of POV hats (and, contrary to what I wrote in the past, the D-pad of the Sony PlayStation 2 DualShock 2 controller is not disabled in analogue mode – rather, it is in that mode detected as being a POV hat (at least using my PlayStation-to-USB adapter));
• the utility now features preliminary detection of trackballs – “preliminary” as neither of my controllers (the other being a Sony PlayStation 3 DualShock 3) features a trackball;
• the utility now features preliminary detection of whether or not a controller has haptic capabilities – “preliminary” as neither of my controllers has been detected as having haptic capabilities in spite of both of my controllers having haptic capabilities (although my adapter or my OS (Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard) might be to blame).