fk@vall.dsv.su.se (Fredrik Kilander) (06/27/90)
Could someone be kind enough to supply me some pointers to the canonical way of getting access to the mouse and joystick information. I know there is a VDI call which returns the mouse position and button state but I'd rather grab the info first hand. The current set of ideas that I entertain involve the following steps: a) Save the vectors to the installed mouse and joystick packet handlers. b) Save the current state of the keyboard processor and tell it to stop reporting events c) Install vectors to my own mouse and joystick packet handler d) Tell the keyboard to start reporting again, including any application specific properties of mouse and joystick e) Process input until its time to shut down. f) Stop the keyboard processor g) Reinstall the original keyboard packet handler vectors h) Restore the previous state of the keyboard processor and tell it to start reporting events The above procedure is my general outline of how to do it. If you know any simpler method, please tell me. Also, I'm interested in the properties and constraints put upon a packet handler. I seem to remember that one must return within 1 ms, but how are the arguments organized? Does TOS prepare the data from the keyboard processor in any way before handling them to the packet handler? I don't want to read mouse coordinates out of some TOS-version specific protected memory location. What I want is to process the messages as soon as they arrive. In particular I hope to estimate joystick motion velocities by measuring the interval between close/open packets. Any references to such techniques would be highly appreciated. I am using Sozobon C, writing in C and assembler, on a 1040 STFM, TOS 1.0. Fredrik Kilander