How is the rumble intensity of the GC controllers being controlled?

ManuelVo · 09-07-2021, 05:13 PM #1

I distinctly remember that GC games are able to make the GC rumble in different intensities. However looking at Dolphin's source code it seems that only full intensity rumble (or rumble off) is ever sent to the controller (https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/a1e806ed76e6746259a730a5db82052b53f084f1/Source/Core/Core/HW/SI/SI_DeviceGCController.cpp#L302-L305). Which leads me to the question at which point and how does the GC control the intensity of the rumble?

**mbc07** · (This post was last modified: 09-07-2021, 06:43 PM by mbc07.)

Accordingly to technical docs like YAGCD, games can only turn the rumble motor on or off. Are you really sure the games you're referring to didn't achieve different rumble effects by rapidly turning the rumble on and off at different intervals?

ManuelVo · 09-07-2021, 09:57 PM #3

This could very well be the case. Unfortunately I don't have much knowledge about the inner workings of a GameCube at all. I'm trying to improve GC Controller Driver Support under Linux and am kinda hoping to find people here that know enough about the GC to give me a definitive answer to what's going on. If games really do rumble intensity control in software, maybe I could emulate a similar behavior in the driver to enable intensity control there. But before going that route I'd like to confirm that there really is no built-in way to do intensity control.