- Can you provide us w/ a link to the website of the manufacturer and the support page of this particular stick?
- It is important that the stick’s hardware or chip sends a signal via USB “saying” to the operating system (i.e. Windows or Linux) that it actually is a joysick (as opposed to a keyboard, a mouse or …).
If, and only if, this joystick “behaves” like any normal USB game device (i.e. does NOT need any special proprietary drivers to work (see website of manufacturer) then you can test on the Command Line Interface (CLI) of your Pi if it is detected. Do:
- Make sure you’ve connected only the joystick you want to test: directly to the Pi, not via an USB hub.
- Install the package ‘Joystick’ w/: “sudo apt-get install joystick”.
- Test joystick/determine numbers of your buttons etc.:
jstest /dev/input/js0.
If you do not see a lot of ‘axis’ and ‘button’ messages but an error message then your stick is not detected by Linux (RetroPie is a Linux application).
If your joystick needs a driver (see website of manufacturer!!!) then you’d better pray that there is a Linux driver that is easily compiled from source code. The Pi runs an ARM platform and most computers are Intel/AMD based. So most “easy to install” drivers (read: pre-compiled binary drivers) are for that platform. However, sometimes a driver or special software does not need to be downloaded from the manufacturers website because the Linux community compiled a driver for it (open source driver or by reverse engineering etc. like the Soundblaster Live audio cards etc.). Then you might be able to install the necessary diver and utility w/ apt-get install driver_name_of_your_joystick. Anyway only the manufacturer can make things clear for us!!
Succes. :)