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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!usenet.coe.montana.edu! saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net! sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!news.byu.edu!cwis.isu.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: How do I read the game port? Message-ID: <1993Jun2.203952.761@fcom.cc.utah.edu> From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 20:39:52 GMT Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu References: <raboczi.738995607@s1.elec.uq.oz.au> Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT) Keywords: 386bsd game interface Lines: 21 In article <raboczi.738995607@s1.elec.uq.oz.au> raboczi@s1.elec.uq.oz.au (Simon Raboczi) writes: >The title line says it all: has anyone written a device driver, or >used inb/outb to directly test the game port? Most game cards require that you poll them -- they don't generate any interrupts. You *could* write a driver to do this, but it would generally be a _bad_thing_(tm); DOS can live with polling because it's single tasking and has nothing better to do with its time. UNIX (and 386BSD) generally like you to generate interrupts if you are a device that wants to be serviced. The lack of a good way to do polling (or other forms of timed I/O) is what makes it difficult to write game port drivers, drivers for some MIDI interfaces, and drivers for QIC-40/QIC-80 tape drives under UNIX or UNIX like systems. Terry Lambert terry@icarus.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.