Will an old Gravis GamePad Pro USB work with RetroPie?

Wizardling

G'day.

Will an old 1999 era Gravis GamePad Pro USB work with RetroPie under Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi 3? Has anyone used this particular gamepad with success?

TIA :-)

mediamogul

@Wizardling

Probably not without some research and effort. That controller was made before modern standards were introduced and as such it requires a driver package to function. You could probably get it working inside of DOSBox if nothing else.

obsidianspider

I have two and they work great.

mediamogul

Color me corrected.

obsidianspider

@mediamogul I don't know how many variants were made, but when I first got my Pi these were the controllers I had laying around and they were plug & play.

mediamogul

Interesting. According to it's wiki page, the second gen Gravis USB controllers were indeed among the early adopters of the USB Human Interface Device class standards.

obsidianspider

@mediamogul I honestly don't know when I bought these, but it was a while ago.

Wizardling

Well my Raspberry Pi 3 is on it's way to me as we speak, and my old Gravis GamePad Pro USB is all I have lying around that isn't permanently needed elsewhere. And boy was it dusty! But it still works after plugging it into my Mac. Some solid gaming hardware IMO :-)

I used to use it in Classic Mac OS and OS X from '99 through to the mid-2000's, with classic console emulators, before I began buying old console titles on my modern consoles, instead. Only I've gotten tired of buying my classic console game library over and over again with every new modern console generation and purchase. So I've returned to emulation, this time by buying a Raspberry Pi 3 to use with my living room TV as a dedicated emulation box (perhaps with BOINC running when I'm not playing as well).

Now while my Macs can see this GamePad, I did often have to use a third party driver in order to be able to assign button functions (USB Overdrive in my case). Few apps did this on their own. All of which led me to my current doubts as to whether it would just work with RetroPie.

I'm very pleased to hear from you - obsidianspider - that there's no problem. Cheers for that! :-)