Cleaning house (spring cleaning time) I stumbled upon a Zoltrix Z-Boxer gamepad I bought at a garage sale long ago. The Z-Boxer feels really cheap, the buttons rattle, and the plastic feels like the kind that breaks if you drop it just a short distance. The cool thing about the Z-Boxer is that Zoltrix actually still maintains a web page for the Z-Boxer.
Of course any discussion of hardware wouldn’t be complete without injecting Linux into the equation and I found the USB id for this on http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids. Apparently the Z-Boxer uses a 04b4 Cypress Semiconductor Corp chip. According to the linux-usb site the Z-Boxer specifically identified with the number d5d5. Sure enough when I opened a terminal and issued dmesg I got a string that confirms this information:
generic-usb 0003:04B4:D5D5.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.00 Joystick [Galy Galy USB Joystick] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-1/input0
And like the driver for Windows it appears no extra driver is needed because it seems (at least under Ubuntu Linux) to use the usbhid: v2.6:USB HID core driver.
I loaded SuperTux and found that the gamepad was working, but creating havoc by scrolling through the menu as if a key was permanently pressed down. I tracked the problem down to the button on the right side which was issuing a constant state of being pressed.
The Z-Boxer gamer feels really cheap. The translucent blue casing and white buttons make it look even cheaper. It simply doesn’t have the feel of a good gamepad (Playstation of XBox). I’m debating making the effort to fix the problem or just simply buy one of the much more expensive XBox wireless ones and the (sigh) proprietary Windows wireless adapter which ironically is suppose to work very well under Linux.