[gpm]Seeking help for gpm-repeater like device for Linux joysticks!

[B. Douglas Hilton]

With all this spiffy USB stuff now, there are suddenly a slew of nifty game controllers available 
for Linux that just work and are real easy to install. Unfortunately the response is totally linear 
for joystick deflection vs output, but it is very difficult to make small deflections near the 
center point with ministicks which are becoming the de-facto standard for game pads. What is needed 
is a cubic transform like this:

   f = pow( x / 32768, 1/3 ) * 32768

Whats going on here is we normalize the input from [-32768, 32768] to [-1, 1], then take the cube 
root, then scale it back to [-32768, 32768]. A gpm-repeater style device for Linux joysticks which 
could do this would be awesome! Feel free to email me back with any tips, in the meantime I will be 
scrutinizing the gpm code. An important aspect is we only want to filter joystick axes, but not hat 
axes, and not button presses or dial events. Also, maybe the user would only want to filter one or 
two axes.

I have subscribed to the list in the meantime while I investigate this project. I think you guys 
could do something like this easy, and I think that your mouse repeater technology is highly 
appropriate for this.

Thanks in advance!