CydandClaude Opus 5
870a8a257d
The legacy joystick math left the output unchanged when the raw sample was exactly 0 - a case a jittering pot never produces, so on real hardware the hold was invisible. vRIO's pad deadzone produces it constantly: every release of the bench gamepad shapes the residual to exactly 0.0 and holds it there, one sample per 55 ms poll. The calibrator held the last in-motion output against that stream indefinitely, so the virtual pad froze off-center at whatever the stick commanded the instant before release. Flown, that read as a Descent 3 pod drifting on yaw and pitch with the stick centered, stopping only when the release was slow enough to land an intermediate sample inside the +/-5 band. It survived a full day of suspects - the game's deadzone, its axis map, its focus handling, com0com, the serial protocol - because every layer below the calibrator was correct: the freeze was visible in joy.cpl itself, and the game's own control trace showed heading latched at -0.38 while the wire carried perfect zeros. Same divergence from the legacy port, same reasoning, as the throttle detent fix above it: zero means centered, not "no information". Both axes; regression tests pin the fast-release case and center stability across repeated zero polls. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
RIOJoy
Modern Windows 10/11 interface between the cockpit RIO (Remote Input/Output) board and Windows, as a virtual joystick / keyboard / mouse — the successor to the legacy vJoy-based app, with no vJoy dependency.
The RIO has 72 digital inputs and outputs (lighted buttons) and 5 analog axes (joystick X/Y, throttle, left pedal, right pedal), connected over RS-232 at 9600 8N1. RIOJoy exposes these to games that don't natively know about the cockpit hardware, with per-game profiles. (The native games — Firestorm, Red Planet — talk to the RIO directly and do not use this app.)
Repository layout
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
src/RioJoy.Core |
Protocol, profile model, input mapper, HID feeder (class library) |
src/RioJoy.Tray |
Background tray application |
tests/RioJoy.Core.Tests |
xUnit tests for the protocol core |
driver/ |
RioGamepad virtual HID driver (KMDF + VHF) — replaces vJoy |
tools/RioJoySmokeTest |
On-cabinet end-to-end check of the feeder → driver path |
tools/XcfRegionExtract |
Extracts cockpit label regions from riojoy.xcf → regions.json |
docs/PLAN.md |
Full modernization plan |
docs/PROTOCOL.md |
RIO wire format + iRIO input-map reference |
docs/FEEDBACK.md |
Game→cockpit feedback endpoint (lamps + plasma over pipe/UDP, rumble) |
docs/INPUT-INTEGRATION.md |
Integrator's guide: cockpit→game — routing kinds, pad/axis mapping, profile building |
docs/OUTPUT-INTEGRATION.md |
Integrator's guide: game→cockpit — lamp address map, plasma display model, recipes |
| RIO board hardware & firmware | Moved to the TeslaRel410 restoration/ archive — board photos, schematics, GAL decode (restoration/rio-hardware) and the RIO 4.3 board firmware (restoration/rio-firmware) |
docs/reference/ |
Cockpit overlay art & the legacy labeling pipeline |
legacy/ |
Original C++/vJoy implementation, kept as reference |
Building
Requires the .NET SDK (8.0 or newer) plus the .NET Framework 4.8
targeting/developer pack, on Windows. The apps target .NET Framework 4.8,
which is in-box on every Windows 10/11 machine — so deployed builds are
framework-dependent and need no runtime install on the target. The driver
builds separately with the WDK (see driver/README.md).
dotnet build RioJoy.sln -c Release
dotnet test RioJoy.sln
Status
Phases 1–5, 9 and 10 are implemented and tested (455 unit tests). Games (or sim
export scripts) can drive the cockpit lamps and plasma display back through the
running app — see docs/FEEDBACK.md. For cockpit cabinets,
RIOJoy deploys bundled per game (deploy\build-pod.ps1, portable config +
--exit-with self-teardown) rather than resident — see the pod section in
docs/INPUT-INTEGRATION.md. The RioGamepad virtual
HID driver is built (KMDF + VHF), test-signed, installed, and verified: it
enumerates in joy.cpl, and the C# HID feeder (DeviceIoControl →
RioGamepad.sys) drives its axes, buttons, and hat end-to-end (see
tools/RioJoySmokeTest). The C# side covers the serial
- RIO protocol core, input mapping + output routing, axis calibration + plasma
display, the tray app + profiles (JSON config,
RIO.iniimporter, three-state auto-switch), and the HID report packer that matches the driver's wire format. Remaining work is on-cabinet (real RIO serial/axis/plasma/auto-switch verification) plus packaging (Phase 6) and the profile editor + overlay generator (Phase 7). Seedocs/PLAN.mdfor the full roadmap.
Testing without hardware: vRIO over a named pipe
The vRIO device emulator can stand
in for the real board with no com0com pair: anywhere a COM port name is
configured — a profile's RioComPort, the app-wide DefaultRioComPort, or the
RioSerialMonitor [port] argument — the endpoint pipe:vrio connects to
vRIO's \\.\pipe\vrio instead (vRIO must have its pipe endpoint open). Serial
bytes and modem lines (including the DTR reset pulse on open) travel as typed
frames over the pipe; the contract lives in
src/RioJoy.Core/Serial/PipeFraming.cs
on this side and vRIO's PipeFraming.cs / the DOSBox-X fork's
serialnamedpipe.h on the others.