Some 3rd party controllers may not identify themselves fully, or the assigned layout of a controller may not meet your needs. In these situations you can provide The Spectrum wth a controller specific mapping which provides the necessary button layout information.
The Spectrum will look on the inserted USB stick (formatted correctly for The Spectrum) for a file named gamecontrollerdb.txt, and will search within it for
configuration entries that match your connected controllers and joysticks. If it finds an entry, it will use that instead
of its internal configuration.
Full details about the content of this file, and some pointers towards tools to help you create configuration entries can be found here. These configuration files are used by many systems, and there is pleanty of help and documentation available on the web. Because each situation will be unique, it is not possible for Retro Games Ltd to offer any individual help with creating controller configurations.
Please note that the
gamecontrollerdb.txtfile may contain Linux, Mac and Windows configuations, however the The Spectrum will only read Linux game controller configuations.
It is advisable to keep the gamecontrollerdb.txt file on the USB stick as small as possible and only contain the Linux
entries for the controllers you wish to modify.
If you want to modify the Retro Games controller and joystick configurations, the default gamecontrollerdb.txt entries are:
03000000591c00002300000010010000,Retro Games LTD THEJosytick Original Joystick,b:b1,a:b0,back:b6,leftshoulder:b4,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,rightshoulder:b5,start:b7,x:b2,y:b3,platform:Linux,
03000000591c00002400000010010000,Retro Games LTD THEJoystick MicroSwitch Joystick,b:b1,a:b0,back:b6,leftshoulder:b4,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,rightshoulder:b5,start:b7,x:b2,y:b3,platform:Linux,
03000000591c00002600000010010000,Retro Games LTD THEGamepad THECXStick,a:b2,b:b1,x:b3,y:b0,back:b6,start:b7,leftshoulder:b4,rightshoulder:b5,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,platform:Linux,