To get a good idea of what this program is about take a look at 
http://freewheeling.sf.net

currently I am adding a few features

Quick run through of the changes

1) adapt freewheeling to use cmake - this currently is preliminary
i am not doing any dependency checking - if you are on a Debian based system try
'sudo apt-get build-dep freewheeling' as this will install all the dependencies you need (except cmake)

2) fixed freewheeling refusing to start because number of threads didn't match. 
I have a solution that works but I am not convinced it is optimal.

3) added support for multiple joystick devices.
there is now a variant of the declare syntax that automatically fetches 
the number of the joystick device based on it's SDL ID string.
the syntax looks like this
<joystick var="[varible name]" id="[SDL id string]" />
this is equivelent to 
<declare var="[variable name]" type="int" init="[joystick # currently assigned to the device]" />
multiple devices with the same id is supported (you can use both sides of the ebm/ps2 for instance) 
obviously if they are actually separate devices then you don't get any say over which order 
they show up in 
Please read data/.fweelin.rc or ~/.fweelin.rc.