#2 Joystick support wanted

[David Turover]

What good is an 80's style action game if you can't
pull a joystick to play it? Plenty, but the feature
would be cool, especially in a fairly antiquated
looking game. Joysticks, gamepads, et cetera should be
supported in a future release. It gives the players one
more way to enjoy the game.

How programs normally implement this at all is a good
question; joystick support is something you don't hear
about often, especially in Unix programming. You never
hear about gamepads except for the occasional story
about someone writing a driver for one or soldering one
to their serial port. It's not clear if there is a
unified gaming device interface. I sure don't want to
have to write one.

The best solution might be to have something that
listens for joystick movements and button-presses and
then reports these as certain predefined characters on
stdin. This way, the input routine code doesn't have to
change, since the device input is prefiltered and
reprocessed into what the code had expected.