josystick driver layer and support of multiple devices of one kind

[Daniel Remenak]

On 12/14/05, Christoph Frick <frick at sc-networks.de> wrote:
> - check also winmm out for the joystick relevant drivers
>   * see if there is support for both kind of joysticks
>   * see if there is support for multiple devices

WinMM under wine supports only /dev/js devices.  It does support
multiple devices, with some limitations.  Under wine, winmm joysticks
are hard mapped as JOYSTICKID1 to /dev/js0 and so on.  It's possible
to end up with ID1 usable and ID2 not, or vice versa.  It's even
theoretically possible to end up with neither ID1 nor ID2 usable if
your joystick is connected to /dev/js2 or higher, although I'd rate
the chances of that actually happening as slim to none.  Dinput
joysticks are even worse as far as multiple devices, since they just
iterate through, take the first working one they find, and call it the
"wine joystick".  If you want to make multiple joysticks work
correctly you'll have to write quite a bit of new code, there's no way
around it.

> - put all the logic how to access the joystick hardware away from
>   dinput.dll and utilize winmm
> - extend the support for multiple devices, for the parts where it is not
>   yet working

Please be aware that the DInput devices (both abstractly and the
current wine implementations) contain significant additional
functionality that the multimedia devices do not.  Using winmm as a
base for dinput is probably not practical without significant
reworking; it simply doesn't do enough.  Force feedback comes to mind.

I'm not sure quite what "stick everything in a single driver, and
handle the complexity here" means, but there are a couple things to be
aware of:
1. It should be possible to use more than one type of device
simultaneously.  E.g. I might have a /dev/js* device not registered by
/dev/input/*, and a /dev/input/* device not registered by /dev/js*.  I
should be able to pick between them without hassle (e.g. they should
both be reported to the application).  DInput does this now, by having
two separate drivers for /dev/js* and /dev/input/*.  This may be even
more important in the future with both joystick capabilities on other
platforms (BSD, OSX, whatever), and with other interfaces on the
various platforms (XInput, SDL, whatever).
2. The two extant dinput joystick backends are quite similar and have
a lot of code duplication...this is what you noticed when you were
moving stuff between them.  Bear in mind that not all possible
joystick backends will share as much code; /dev/js* and /dev/input/*
were _designed_ at the kernel level to have similar interfaces.  From
experience writing code that uses FreeBSD's USB HID for joystick
access, there is very little in common between it and the linux
interfaces.  XInput is even more different.

--Daniel Remenak