Hi Mark, here's the binary with highmem and joystick support.
Hi Dave!
Day 7 of CoVid for Anne (still testing positive) so haven't had much time to do anything. On top of it, went from 18 C last Wednesday to a blizzard today: -4 C, -14 wind chill, 50 km/hr winds and 15 cm of wet snow so far today.
As I'm stuck inside, I had a chance to do some testing.
Did download your latest Highmem / Joystick enabled concoction of Rocks and Diamonds.
Enabling xevents for my older joystick I was able to have it recognized by the game, including setup as "Joystick1" - xevents needs to be enabled first, otherwise the game still locks up on opening.
You can see the game is designed for gamepads, as I also get, during the configuration setup, a picture of a gamepad and flashing buttons - I was able to have the game recognize all four buttons, but there is no response when I move the joystick around - no response also trying to map the Hat to some function as well.
Getting out of configuration I noted that, in the menus, the cursor wanted to move up the highlight to the very top of each of the menus, all by itself - using the mouse to highlight lower menu items does work, but after clicking a menu function, the cursor moves to the top of the menu displayed yet again and pegs there.
I don't know if this was what you and Martin were describing about the up arrow - its like the up arrow is stuck for some reason, sending signals constantly. This does not occur if the input device is set back to keyboard.
Starting the first game, I was able to use the joystick to move the little guy around up and down and sideways on the screen to take down walls and capture gems. However the "up arrow stick" I guess you can call it, was still there within the game, as the game is constantly wanting to move the guy up to the top of the screen. After a few minutes of playing I again was getting the "loss of focus" within the game I mentioned in previous posts to Wim - suddenly the joysticks movement functions would quit, and I'd have to close the game.
I will say that I can close the game gracefully with both HiMem and Joystick enabled (ie. not hard locks) - losing focus at worst requires me to use CAD Popup to terminate with a kill signal. However in most cases I can terminate gracefully simply using the ESC key and the Quit procedure in the game.
I can also say that I was able to use the GamePad version of Rocks and Diamonds to play but again had the loss of focus problem - exiting was a little ugly there, as I could only exit using kill in CAD popup.
So, Martin, if your following, and want to take this to Orlando on the weekend:
1) SDL also works with joysticks in ArcaOS, as proof of concept, as illustrated by Rocks and Diamonds, when Wims xevents.cmd and his drivers are used - unfortunately unless someone is using the same joysticks as I am, they may not be able to use the two custom xevents.cmd files I am using to reproduce this.
2) The implementation is not perfect, but thanks to your porting Rocks and Diamonds, Dave, we now know it is possible, in addition to playing OS/2, DOS and DOSBox related games to address SDL games, using Wims drivers
If anyone else has tried using the xevents files I posted, with success, setting up Wims drivers as per the guide I published, I would like to hear about it - also if some bright REXX savvy programmer has modified one of those REXX files to address their Joystick successfully, I would like to hear about that too - looking at the xevents files I have, there is a lot of commonality in what Wim rather brilliantly put together, between the two files, but as always the devil is in the details - perhaps with a little head scratching, pooling our resources and skills, we can get other joysticks to work as well.
Of course, this also applies to the GamePads - I don't know how much commonality exists with those - using Martins xevents.cmd, it may be easier to either use, or modify accordingly.
Anyway Christmas has come early, quickly and unexpectedly to Alberta (either that or a freezing hell, as by the end of the week their talking -15 to -16C as highs ......... that's January, not November weather :'( )
Best of the week, Dave, and to everyone else as well!
M