[SOLVED] Steam, Borderlands 2, xpad not working - and movies

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Goverp · Post by **Goverp** » Sat Jun 14, 2025 10:22 pm

I noticed that Borderlands 2 was a free download over last weekend, so I dipped a toe in the icy waters.
Thanks to the wiki troubleshooting guide, Borderlands 2 under Steam now works OK with a keyboard and mouse, but it's horrid in my cramped work area. So I bought a game controller (Gamesir T4N) which works in USB connection - after a few kernel tweaks, jstest shows all the buttons and joysticks working correctly.

In Steam, I've configured Borderlands to us steam's controller mapping, and AFAICT the buttons work in the configurator. But when I play the game, no sign of controller support, and I'm back to the keyboard

Reading the wiki, I may have some misconfiguration: I think from earlier times, my /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords selects a few items from the steam-overlay, rather than everything. Dunno if that's relevant.

krumpf · Post by **krumpf** » Sun Jun 15, 2025 6:37 am

Not sure that will help but in the past I had an emulator where my gamepad wouldn't be detected. It finally worked after I set CONFIG_INPUT_JOYDEV (Device Drivers > Input device support > Joystick interface) to yes in kernel.

Goverp · Post by **Goverp** » Sun Jun 15, 2025 7:26 am

krumpf, thanks, but INPUT_JOYSTICK is already selected. as well as INPUT_JOYSTICK_XPAD

Goverp · Post by **Goverp** » Tue Jun 17, 2025 4:00 pm

Sorted both my controller problem AND got the startup movies (and I expect others) to run OK.

The basic issue was that I was running Borderlands 2 under Steam but not Proton. Configuring the game to run under the latest stable Proton (9.4 ? I didn't write it down) - that's Steam's Proton, not the Gentoo ebuild.
Downside, yet another 3 Gb Borderlands update - I'm not sure if this is Steam repeating the same download, a series of updates, or something triggered by reconfiguring - and another Gb or thereabouts of Proton itself.

Now I get full control from my xpad controller (including rumbles - Oh Joy!), AND the movies playing, so I sort of get the storyline. Not essential, but it helps. Having reconfigured the video for 1920x1080, and lots of video effects (my graphics is an old but adequate Radeon RX 570), it's now a decent game environment.