hastoerm@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Moriland) (12/20/90)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: Summary: Expires: References: Sender: Reply-To: hastoerm@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Moriland) Followup-To: Distribution: Organization: Evil Young Mutants For A Better Tomorrow. Keywords: two three button joysticks Well, after a lengthy mail discussion with Dave Haynie at Commodore, I was surprised to learn that the Amiga already has two button joystick support built into the machine at intiution level and support for a third button at a slightly lower level. He says that anyone doing any real programming on the Amiga (i.e., game producers) are probably well aware of the support and just haven't bothered to use it for whatever reason. I suggested the start of a letter writing campaign and he agreed that it might help. An excerpt follows: I don't think programmers need education on the 2 or 3 button question, they need convincing. It doesn't take too much of a leap of imagination for them to figure, "hey, if the thing supports 2 and 3 button mice, it supports 2 and 3 button joysticks". I'm sure the majority of the programmers know this. But who has 2 or 3 button joysticks? They can't obviously _require_ that, since that's akin to requiring a 3 button mouse in an AmigaOS program. The only one that really does is X Windows, because that's an X Standard, and you go out and buy a 3 button mouse (or struggle) if you use X. But you might have trouble getting anyone to buy a new joystick to play any game. So it can't be required. Next step is convincing any programmer out there that there's a good reason to bother supporting any 2 or 3 button joystick. Most of them probably don't consider it worth their time, since they believe the number of people with >1 button joysticks is effectively 0, and therefore not a selling point. At least, that's how I see it. So if you write letters, you don't need to supply technical information, they already know about, but don't consider it useful. Letter writing is probably your best bet. Companies do listen if they hear something often enough, especially if it amounts to very little extra work on their part. Try magazines too; if you make it an issue, you make it a marketing problem to not have it if it's well publicized. Sorry about the funky spacing, but I just buffer dumped it in. Still, you get the general drift. So, at this time I am accepting Mail at my address with the names and adresses of any and all game makers anyone knows of on the Amiga that they would like to see support 3 button games. I would update the list and re-post it periodicly so that we might get a good letter writing campaign going. Please be certain to spread the listing as far as possible on and off the net! Perhaps we can make a change for the better... -- /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ "As if things weren't bad enough already...."| Founder of: "Evil Young Please excuse my ramblings as they come from | Mutants For A Better Tommorow. a diseased mind. -Moriland | hastoerm@vela.acs.oakland.edu