[net.micro.trs-80] Reading 1000 joysticks

john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) (10/11/85)

Since the tech. manual isn't available to the public yet, I was wondering:

Does anybody know the way to read the 1000's joysticks from a language
other than BASIC?

I tried the program in this month's BYTE (written for the IBM-PC) to read
them from Turbo PASCAL, but I only get meaningful results for the buttons.

Thanks in advance.


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toma@tekchips.UUCP (Tom Almy) (10/11/85)

In article <523@moncol.UUCP> john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) writes:
>Since the tech. manual isn't available to the public yet, I was wondering:
>

GREAT NEWS (for me at least), I got the tech manual yesterday.  I had one on
order, and they had my money, since March!  Don't give up hope!!

>Does anybody know the way to read the 1000's joysticks from a language
>other than BASIC?
>I tried the program in this month's BYTE (written for the IBM-PC) to read
>them from Turbo PASCAL, but I only get meaningful results for the buttons.
>
>Thanks in advance.

The joysticks read just fine from a Forth routine I have which was written
for the PC, and they work fine with games.  Port decoding is slightly
different which might be causing the problems with the BYTE article (which I
haven't seen.  In general you do the following:

1. Write to port 200H to start the integrator.
2. THe appropriate bit in port 201H goes true when the integrator voltage
   reaches that provided by the stick.  Its up to you to measure the time
   (which is <= 1.12 msec).

Port read pin assignments are:
bit
0	Left, X
1	Left Y
2 	Right X
3	Right Y
4	Left button #1
5	Left button #2
6	Right button #1
7	Right button #2

BTW, the technical reference manual 1) has no index, 2) has no page numbers
for most of its length, and 3) has an enormous number of typos (at least one
per page on average).  


Tom Almy