[MiNT] [RFC] AES extension for games

[Patrice Mandin <mandin.patrice@orange.fr>]

Hello,

There is an issue I would like to see solved, and I think it can be
done properly.

Many people hook up directly to the IKBD vector interrupt for the
following reasons:
1. Getting KEY UP, KEY DOWN events for keyboard
2. Getting mouse relative motion
3. Getting joystick events

(2) and (3) can be done also by hooking in the related XBIOS vector
table, returned by Kbdvbase() function, and this is what I do in SDL
when you use the GEM driver.

I would like to avoid hooking any system vector at all. I think it
could be doable, at least for mouse and keyboard, to add more events to
the AES event queue. Current applications would simply ignore events
whose ID is unknown for them. Also, the AES could tell the application
(through appl_getinfo) that it can send these new events.

Currently, /dev/mouse is not usable under GEM to get relative motion,
because when the application opens it, mouse events are not sent to the
AES anymore, the cursor is simply stuck till the application close the
device.

For joysticks, just having devices would suffice, so I can deal with
that, without AES changes, but the driver must be written.

-- 
Patrice Mandin
WWW: http://pmandin.atari.org/
Programmeur Linux, Atari
Spécialité: Développement, jeux