Re: [Plib-devel] FreeBSD USB Joystick support

[James T. <zak...@ma...>]

On Sunday, January 26, 2003, at 11:48  pm, Bert Driehuis wrote:
>> It seems *totally* unreasonable to have to go to all this trouble to
>> read a joystick.  The Linux drivers manage to keep backwards 
>> compatibility
>> (my USB stick works just fine with standard JS code)...surely this 
>> weird
>> decision is something that the driver writers should at least defend:

> None of the BSD's currently have any support for multi-axis joysticks,
> to the best of my knowledge, and the driver that's there is quite old.

<snip>

> The obvious alternative is to hack together a driver. I considered 
> doing
> that (it obviously is not rocket science, seeing that the uhid(4) 
> driver
> already does all the hard work). The hard part is getting the API 
> right.

Um, the obvious solution here is to stop thinking in terms of 
joysticks. The Mac driver is simply written ontop of the Mac USB-HID 
interface, which is completely generic. I know Linux has something 
similar, and I assume BSD does to. This means you don't have to worry 
about any weird legacy joystick interfaces (down with gameports! boo!), 
jut the vagaries of the USB HID specification (which is available 
online).

If you decide to go this route, the OS-X driver should be somewhat 
useful to you.

Oh, and I agree with Steve, needing to write a daemon / use a thread 
just to read the joystick is insane. I know you (Bert) didn't make this 
situation but it's just crazy.

H&H
James

--
You whine like a mule. You are still alive!