blackhole://nilFM

game controller desktop config

When the desktop machine is across the room, we use a controller-only config.

getting to the desktop without the keyboard

First, we enable autologin and automatically start the graphical desktop. If you use this machine as anything more than a media/gaming appliance you should encrypt your data at rest with a USB keyfile. (See filesystem surgery, you can adapt this to work without password-protecting the keyfile itself.) In /etc/sv/agetty-tty1/run we can use the -a argument to autologin with a given username. Then in my ~/.kshrc I add a clause that will launch the graphical environment automatically if it's not running:

if ! pgrep Xorg > /dev/null; then
  startx
fi

(You may note in my usual kshrc that I already alias startx = 'exec startx', so when the graphical session terminates, the shell also logs out. This combined with the agetty autologin makes the session automatically restart when logged out from.)

using the controller

We use AntiMicroX to map the controller inputs. It supports using multiple assignment layouts (sets). I use a generic PS3 controller (see computing accessories), but you could adapt this to any modern controller.

The layout file is here, and the layouts are illustrated below.

the primary set

the other set

Is blank, except for the guide button which switches you back to the primary set. This lets games natively bind to the controller inputs. When you finish playing, you toggle back to the primary set.

virtual keyboard config

Other than the colors, I use a vanilla svkbd config and save the binary to ~/bin/svkbd; the sript called by right stick click in the primary layout similarly to the graphics autostart above, just launches svkbd if it isn't running, otherwise kills it:

#!/bin/sh

if ! pgrep svkbd; then
  svkbd
else
  killall svkbd
fi

We can configure openbox to keep the svkbd window borderless, on top, hug the bottom of the screen, and on all desktops. And we add a compositing rule in picom.conf to be able to see behind the keyboard a bit.

upscaling

If the montor is across the room we probably want the UI upscaled for the most part. For lxappearance and qt5ct we can increase the font size to 18pt. For PCSX2, which for reasons I don't remember we have running on flatpak, we have to tell it to upscale:

flatpak override --user --env=GDK_SCALE=2 net.pcsx2.PCSX2

GDK_SCALE needs to be a positive integer.

Lastly, we can increase the font sizes to 18 in the openbox config, and I made an xl version of the abyss theme