Emulator

Here is the patch.

Thanks for the patch, not sure if this is safe enough to apply during feature freeze though...

On one hand it is definitely a new feature so it shouldn't be merged in feature freeze. On the other hand I think it is completely "safe". It does not do anything if the user does not configure a rumble effect or does not set the environment variable and what it does are IO operations that should only cause error messages to be printed to the console in case something is wrong. And unless the environment variable points to something wrong I see no way anything can go wrong.

Also a new patch is attached. The only change is for the value of effect.replay.length. Apparently 0 means infinite (looked at SDL 1.3 source for that because it is not documented in Linux's ff.txt).

Patch looks fine.
It would be cool if we could remove SDL entirely, using native stuff for input and output.

Billiard: On linux SDL is about the only way to go for some of these controller inputs. Of course on linux SDL is pretty much native also.

Now features freeze is over.
Should this patch be submitted?

It looks good to me. Although I don't have any controllers to test this with, so I can only base my decision on the perusal of the code.

It seems that using the XInput extension this could be done at a slightly higher level (i.e. without raw dev access), and devices could be detected without setting an environment variable.

Will this ever be included? If not, mark as WontFix.