Nyko Airflow compatibility issues

[kolhell]

I'm running Steam on Gentoo. I have a pile of controllers working (Logitech F310 wired, Rock Candy 360 wired, PS3 wired, PS4 bluetooth, Wii U Pro bluetooth, Steam controller), which has been an adventure to say the least (especially with some games not liking the Steam overlay, etc), but I cannot get my old Nyko Airflow running.

This controller is from the mid-oughts, btw, so it's old as dirt and USB 1.1.

Anyway, kernel recognizes it fine, and I am able to get output from it in terminal when issuing both `cat /dev/input/jsN` and `cat /dev/input/eventN`

However, once I load up Steam (BPM or not) this particular controller stops responding in terminal. None of my other controllers do - you can continue to dump their respective /dev/input/whatever and see button presses, but this particular one stops. Closing Steam and then replugging the controller brings it back. Replugging the controller while Steam is running does cause it to be recognized by the kernel, however I cannot get readings from it via /dev/input without first closing Steam then replugging it.

I have the appropriate udev rules and permissions set. The /dev/input interface shows crw-rw-r-- as it should, and my user is a member of the input group.

Steam somewhat-recognizes the controller. If I go into the settings menu it does list "Nyko AIRFLOW" and allows me into the menu to set the button mapping, however it does not recognize any of the button presses (and does not allow me to configure the mapping).

If I go to a game, however, and select Manage Game > Controller Configuration I get a nice message saying "No Controller Attached"

Help or suggestions of what's going on here would be appreciated. Or if anyone else has an ancient USB gamepad that works with Steam. Between the manner in which Steam needs write permissions to gamepads for them to work with Steam, and how the Steam service renders this particular pad inoperable until Steam is closed and the controller is replugged, I am feeling very strongly that this is a bug with Steam itself.

I am aware that there are ways to create keyboard bindings for gamepad inputs, and I am not interested in this for a wealth of reasons.

Here's the dmesg:

[  976.683919] usb 3-8: new low-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[  982.247611] usb 3-8: New USB device found, idVendor=124b, idProduct=4d00, bcdDevice= 0.00
[  982.247613] usb 3-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[  982.247613] usb 3-8: Product: AIRFLOW
[  982.247614] usb 3-8: Manufacturer: Nyko
[  982.252319] input: Nyko AIRFLOW as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb3/3-8/3-8:1.0/0003:124B:4D00.0007/input/input33
[  982.252503] hid-generic 0003:124B:4D00.0007: input,hidraw6: USB HID v1.10 Gamepad [Nyko AIRFLOW] on usb-0000:00:14.0-8/input0

I'm not including kernel configs or anything deeper than this as the gamepad works perfectly with anything other than Steam.

Thanks!