BrokenBlog

I’ve got a PS3 controller, but using it with Ubuntu is a huge hassle, not that it doesn’t work mind you, it’s just that most software doesn’t seem to expect 28 axes and 19 buttons that overlap with each other. I’m even perfectly happy using it with a USB cable but I am scorned nonetheless.

Anyway, while I don’t have a perfect solution, I have a good enough solution for ZSNES. ZSNES normally confuses the axes and buttons when configuring different keys, so the input dialog is basically useless. But, I noticed the start/select/PS buttons all don’t have axes so I guessed that the seemingly arbitrary values ZSNES uses for those specific keys were the only correct ones. So I used select (310 according to zsnes, and button 0) to determine the offset for the buttons.

Basically it means (310 + button #) = zsnes button #. At least on my computer. So I used jstest to get the button numbers and hand-edited my ~/.zsnes/zinput.cfg, ending up with this in the player 1 section:

; Player 1 Input
; Input Device: 0 = Unplugged, 1 = KEYBOARD/GAMEPAD
pl1contrl=1
; Keys for Select, Start, Up, Down, Left, Right, X, A, L, Y, B, R
pl1selk=310
pl1startk=313
pl1upk=314
pl1downk=316
pl1leftk=317
pl1rightk=315
pl1Xk=322
pl1Ak=323
pl1Lk=320
pl1Yk=325
pl1Bk=324
pl1Rk=321

It works perfectly. Oh, and one last tip. I’m not sure how everyone experiences this, but the controller gives me no input until I press the PS button. This has the strange effect of turning on my PS3 when I unplug the controller later, but whatever.

After adding a custom event to something I was coding up today I started intermittently receiving something like this error message:

TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.events::Event@148cb29 to com.brokenfunction.CustomEvent

It came with no stack trace, no line numbers, and had no determinable source. In other words, it was incredibly annoying. I had recieved this message before because I had not implemented clone(), but clone() was working properly now, what could be the cause? I pressed the play/pause button on my keyboard while pondering this and it triggered the error message. More research indicated it had nothing to do with any keyboard events, and was actually due to the player apparently quickly losing and then gaining focus. Why my OS sees fit to do this is still an unsolved mystery.

For my CustomEvent I had a couple types, including ACTIVATE and DEACTIVATE, which are already handled by Event but I added them anyway (var ACTIVATE:String = Event.ACTIVATE) so I wouldn’t even have to import Event when using my CustomEvent. So, on a hunch I changed the values of ACTIVATE to a different string and it fixed the bug!

The EventDispatcher I used to dispatch my CustomEvents was completely isolated so I foolishly thought it wouldn’t actually start broadcasting events implicitly – I was wrong. EventDispatcher still dispatches ACTIVATE/DEACTIVATE (when the player focuses/blurs) no matter what. I presume the error message came up when listeners were expecting a CustomEvent and got an Event instead. The lack of a stack trace could be explained by the fact that there is no stack to trace, as the caller is some Flash internal somewhere and it never actually gets to my code because of the errors.