[net.micro.amiga] Window I/O through DOS

west@calgary.UUCP (Darrin West) (10/23/86)

I am attempting to port to my brother's Amiga a spline editor I wrote in an
undergraduate course.  It made use of the ability of Unix to open a
device as a file (i.e. one's terminal), and then do all line drawing and
keyboard/mouse input with escape sequences written with fprint etc.

In certain place (the AmigaDOS manual??) there are references to "devices"
called "con:" and "raw:".  They work from CLI as advertised, but a simple
C program to test for necessary properties does not react as expected.

Essentially I open a "raw:xx/yy/mx/my/window_name" window as a file, with
"w+", so that I can send it
(as described in the ROM Kernel manual) an escape sequence to tell Intuition
(I am assuming) to send mouse and keyboard input back to this file as
extended streams of data.  (Am I correct in assuming it is actually human
readable strings? eg. 0 as opposed to ^@ <- that is a null byte!)

I then do a seek(0), which is regularly needed to switch from write to read,
then I read and echo every character (barring escapes, so that I dont foul
up the other window) back to stdout (CLI).  I see an occaisional charater
that looks very much like it was part of the mouse event string, but nothing
concrete or repeatable.

I want a SIMPLE method of reconnecting stdin and stdout to a different
window than the parent window!!!!  Am I possibly doing something wrong
with my I/O calls, misinterpreting the ROM Kernel Manual's description
of the neccessary steps to achieve this end, or worse yet mis-using
the "con:" "raw:" facility completely and MUST return to messing with
interupt driven message parsing.

I have a feeling that there is some command I must give to Intuition
to tell it not to keep grabbing the mouse events (although I thought
the "\084etc." jazz would do that).  I would gladly trade some speed
of I/O for a simple interface, as the bulk of the work in my spline
editor is calculating the points on the curves.

I have access to all (I hope) the manuals, so a pointer to the
appropriate sections would be acceptable (given that you are
sure your solution is functional; I spent a lot of time on this).

Darrin.

-- 

Mechanic to autophile:
"It hesitates on acceleration?
 Maybe it's the fact that your
 drive-shaft is still back at
 the corner."

Darrin West
Master's Unit (read: student)
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta.
..![ubc-vision,ihnp4]!alberta!calgary!west

Brain fault (cortex dumped)