Have you ever wanted to control a Flash game with a gamepad? Back when I was working on Space Kitty with Zach , I thought it might be enlightening to do this, but of course Flash isn’t able to access USB devices.
However, Flash does have the Socket class, so if I could read the gamepad’s state from some other network-capable runtime, I’d be able to connect it to Flash remotely. It didn’t take long to discover the PyHID library, a free Python package that provides an interface to USB Human Interface Devices and even auto-detects probable game controllers.
Lacking documentation for my Logitech gamepad, I wrote a script to dump its live state to the terminal, then mashed buttons and watched the output until I’d reverse-engineered its output.
That done, it was trivial to serve the PyHID output to a Flash client. I’ve attached a demo if you want to try it out. Obviously, this isn’t even close to working on a webpage due to Flash’s security sandboxing and the fact that you have to run the python server locally, but it’s fun for prototyping games and could be of use in some kiosk-style application. (That said, I make no warranty as to its utility.)
Grab the demo here:
Remember, you’ll have to adjust Flash’s security sandboxing to allow the SWF to connect to the gamepad server.
