When the PS4 reports a user signed in on a controller, the service asks for
the user's name and adds it to the status as `user`. The PS4 may not have
finished signing the user in by then, so a failed look-up is retried every
half second for five seconds. The tile shows the name in place of
"Controller N" (the ring keeps the number), and the controller screen reads
"Controller 1 · Alex". Names are kept out of the log, since people post logs
in bug reports, and they go out cleaned: quotes and backslashes escaped, and
control characters or anything that isn't valid UTF-8 replaced, because a
browser drops the whole WebSocket on a text frame that isn't valid UTF-8.
An Invite panel, opened from a button next to the settings or from the menu,
shows the page's address as a QR code for friends to scan. The console makes
the code with the QR encoder the app already ships, from the address the page
reached it on, and sends the module grid; the page draws it as SVG, so it still
needs no libraries.
The gamepad picker's tooltip had the same "Controller 1 · Controller 1" doubling
the controller screen had; it now names the user too.
A gamepad's row now says "no rumble in this browser" when the browser has
no way to rumble it: common for a DualSense, while Chrome and Edge rumble
Xbox pads. Before, it just never rumbled.
The heartbeat now reports how many rumble/light-bar reads ran in the last
minute and what they cost on average and at worst, in microseconds: the
longest an arriving input could wait behind one.
A game talks to a virtual controller as it would to a real one, and the system
keeps what it asked for. scePadVirtualDeviceGetRemoteSetting reads it back in
the layout of a DualShock 4's output report: the two motors at [3] and [4], the
light bar at [5..7]. The layout was read on the console while games rumbled and
users signed in, and feedback.c is tested against those exact buffers.
The service reads it every 16 ms for each controller; games pulse rumble for
only tens of milliseconds, which a 100 ms poll missed.
- Rumble goes to the controller's owner as {"method":"v","params":[pad,large,
small]}, once per change, and to whoever takes a controller over, so a page
never keeps buzzing on old news. The page already drove an Android phone's
vibration and a gamepad's actuators from it.
- The light bar goes into the status everyone sees. The PS4 sets player colours
at a quarter strength, so the colour is brightened to full, keeping its hue;
an unlit bar keeps the controller's own colour.
- Without the call, controllers work as before and it is logged once.
Also: the page says "Choose user on PS4", not "on TV", since not everyone plays
on a TV. The test stub takes C4F-TEST-FEEDBACK lines to set what the "game"
wants, and the test client can wait for messages the service pushes.
- README: what Control4Free is and why it reaches menus and sign-in, features,
a quick start, screenshots, requirements, limitations, credits.
- docs/: installation, playing, troubleshooting (every message the page and the
app can show), how it works, and the WebSocket protocol.
- CONTRIBUTING.md: building, testing, code style, releasing.
- Screenshots of the page on phones and a PC and of the app, made against the
real service built for the host, at the example address 192.168.1.20.
- Issue forms, a contact list pointing at the guides and private security
reporting, and FUNDING.yml.
- CHANGELOG.md dated. CI now publishes this version's section of it as the
release notes rather than the whole file.
- THIRD_PARTY.md: the DualShock 4 diagram the buttons are drawn after (CC BY
3.0), and Apollo Save Tool for the package settings.
- Page: the Vibration setting no longer promises to buzz when a game rumbles,
which 1.0.0 cannot do yet.
From a last pass over the code and a set of screenshots on phones, an iPad and
a PC:
- The menu button sat on top of R2 on a phone in landscape: R2 starts about 68px
from the right edge, room for one corner button, not two. The menu and full
screen buttons now stack down the edge instead.
- On a narrow phone the connection status was cut off mid-address ("Connected
to 192.16"). The address is now a detail that narrow screens leave out.
- The controller screen said "Controller 1 · Controller 1": the page's own label
and the console's name for it had become the same words. The console's name
is only added now when it says something more.
- Free controllers still offered "a controller on this device", and the app
"controllers connected to the phone or PC"; both now say gamepad, as the rest
of the page does.
- SECURITY.md said no website could drive the console. A page opened from a
saved file connects with Origin: null, and that has to be accepted because the
saved file is how gamepads work in browsers that keep the Gamepad API to secure
pages; a website can send the same Origin from a sandboxed frame. It now says
exactly that, and what such a page still cannot do.
- THIRD_PARTY.md credited the GoldHEN call to autorun.c; it is in sandbox.c.
- Two comments pointed at a tag that only exists locally.
The menu button sat at a fixed 70px from the right while the full-screen button
followed the safe area. On an iPhone in landscape the safe area is 47-59px, so
the full-screen button slid underneath the menu; on Android, with no safe area,
the two stood 24px apart; and wherever full screen is hidden, the menu was left
floating away from the corner.
Both now sit in one row that follows the safe area, 8px apart, and a hidden
button takes its gap with it.
Safari on iPhone lets only video go full screen, so the button did nothing
there. The check for it looked for requestFullscreen, which exists on iPhone even
though every call is refused; it now asks fullscreenEnabled instead.
On iPhone the button now says how to get the same thing: add the page to the Home
Screen and open it from there, where it runs without Safari's bars. When the page
already runs that way, or is installed anywhere else, the button goes away.
Elsewhere it goes full screen as before, prefixed or not.
Three bits of polish for people who did not write this.
The payload serves /manifest.webmanifest and /icon-192.png, and the page points
at both, so a phone can keep the controller on its home screen instead of typing
an IP address again. The icon is the app's own icon, rendered by the launcher's
drawing code and committed, so the payload build needs no renderer; a test
re-renders it and fails if the two drift apart. One size only: the gradient does
not compress, and a 512 copy would add 150 KB for a splash screen that a plain
HTTP shortcut never shows. write_png now picks the best filter per row, which
also shrinks the package icon.
When the service starts it works out which address the console is actually
reachable on, from the route to the outside world without sending anything, and
puts it in the start-up notification on the TV.
Every error the page can show now says what happened and what to do about it,
rather than "Invalid axis", and the README has a troubleshooting section covering
the ones people will actually hit.
Input was queued and handed to the virtual device on a 16 ms tick, so a press
could wait most of a frame before the console saw it, and the page only sent
state once per animation frame.
The payload now reports a sample as soon as it arrives, unless one went out
within the last 4 ms, and then keeps a 4 ms cadence while the player is doing
something, as a real DualShock 4 does. Half a second after the input stops it
falls back to the 16 ms keepalive, and the main loop's wait follows: 2 ms while
input is moving, 8 ms with a controller sitting idle, 50 ms with no controller at
all, so an unused service costs the console almost nothing.
On the page, a button, touch or key edge is flushed where it happens instead of
waiting for the next frame; stick and trigger movement still rides the frame
loop, where coalescing is what you want. A `ping` method and a round-trip
reading next to the version make a laggy network visible rather than guessed at.
Connecting a controller took a second or two in the middle of the request
handler: drain the kernel log, prove it delivers, call AddDevice, then read the
log until the device turns up. Everyone else waited. A second player adding a
controller froze the first player's input for as long as it took.
The service now owns one kernel-log reader and reads it a line at a time from
its main loop, and creating a controller is a state machine that loop advances:
drain, verify with a marker, AddDevice, adopt the DeviceId. Nothing blocks, so
the other players keep playing and keep being answered while it runs. Their
slots show "Connecting" until the claim is complete. One controller is created
at a time, because two AddDevice calls at once produce two log lines with no way
to tell which device is which; a second request is refused rather than queued.
Nothing in vda.c waits any more, so the callback that kept pads reporting
through those waits is gone, and the line parsing moved to src/klog_line.c,
which the host tests build as it is.
Only the login manager's own line is accepted as our new device now:
SCE_MBUS_EVENT_DEVICE_ADDED with subType 2. The old code fell back to any
"device added" line it saw, so a real pad being plugged in while a controller
was being created could hand us a DeviceId we do not own, and every input would
go to someone else's pad.
On the page: a refused claim re-reads the console's view and gives up only the
controllers that are in use elsewhere, instead of disconnecting everything this
device was playing with; and when getGamepads() starts throwing, every gamepad
source is blanked, so a held button cannot be flushed for ever with nothing left
to release it.
The test stub is now a fake kernel log: it writes the lines firmware 10.01
writes, our own mirrored output included, so the real reading, marker check and
DeviceId matching are what the tests exercise. SECURITY.md writes down what the
open-LAN design does and does not defend.
The staged spike that worked out the VDA call order is no longer part of the
build. It is kept at tag spike-final.
- src/main.c is the service only: instance lock, credentials, MBus and pad
init, then the web service. src/server.c and include/c4f_server.h are gone
with stage 8, and so are the stage-only helpers in src/vda.c: the MBus bind
and holds, the assignment and button-map probes, and the GoldHEN klog stream
path. The service reads /dev/klog, which is what works.
- VERSION holds the only version number. Both Makefiles pass it in, the
packager reads it for param.sfo and the package name, and the build and
deploy scripts read it for the file they look for.
- The payload's log is /data/control4free/control4free.log, not spike.log.
- The page drops the protocol 1 branches: the payload has always answered 2.
A console slot is a "controller" and a pad plugged into the phone or PC is a
"gamepad", so the two no longer read as the same word.
- The host tests move to tests/, with tests/run.py to run all four suites. They
build the real sources with the PS4 calls stubbed, so they need no console.
klog_test now covers the device path only, and asserts that nothing ever
connects to GoldHEN's klog server.
The mark is a vector DualShock 4 seen from above (launcher/logo.c), filled
with stb_truetype's anti-aliased rasterizer through a small path API in
draw.c. The app's top bar and the page's top bar, toast and favicon all use
it. The package icon shows three controllers with their light bars glowing
in the page's player colours.
A GoldHEN ELF payload that creates virtual DualShock 4 controllers with
scePadVirtualDevice*, the path Remote Play uses, so they work on the home
screen, at sign-in and in games. A phone or PC drives them from a page the
payload serves on port 4264.
- Stage 0 (default) is the browser controller: four slots, explicit
creation, native PS4 user selection, input over a WebSocket.
- Stages 1-8 are the diagnostics that established the VDA call order.
- Loopback-only /api/status and /api/stop for the launcher app.
- The klog connection is reopened when a controller is created, so a
start through GoldHEN AutoRun still works if it beats the klog server.
The VDA code is ported from seregonwar/SplashDown (GPL-3.0).
MoHadiShibli