What's the simplest way to trigger MIDI tones from joystick button presses? My kids have a "dance mat" (USB joystick with 10 buttons only, no axles or anything else) and I'd like to turn it into an instrument.
My only preference is for platform independence (linux and recent windows variants minimum) and ease of installation of the end product.
I'm looking at game frameworks, but there are gazilions, and most seem to be centered around graphics, or be based on SDL inheriting its supposedly poor MIDI support.
I'm doing Java EE and other server-side stuff by day, can program this much in any high level language, so don't hold back on the crazy ideas! My prototype is in Scratch for example :-)
I'd like to open source the whole thing, so no commercial tools please!
Any advice appreciated.
Ps: Hmm, no dance-mat tag yet...
Use SDL for the joystick input, but use something like PortMidi (part of PortMedia) for the MIDI output. That assumes that you've got some kind of standalone synth that can do your sound generation for you.