Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 17:14:00 +0200 From: "Eckhard Stolberg" Subject: Controller names in SDL for Windows I'm working on an Atari 2600 emulator for different systems that uses the SDL. Some time ago someone created an adaptor that lets you use your old Atari controllers with your computer through the USB port. Some of the Atari controllers require special handling by the emulator, so it would be nice, if it would be possible to detect if any of the controllers connected to the computer is this adaptor. SDL would allow that with the SDL_JoystickName function, but unfortunately it doesn't work properly on Windows. On Linux and MacOSX this function returns the name of the controller, but on Windows you'll only get the name of the joystick driver. Most joysticks nowadays use the generic Microsoft driver, so they all return the same name. In an old MSDN article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarinput/html/msdn_extdirect.asp) Microsoft describes how to read out the OEM controller names from the registry. I have implemented this for the SDL controller handler on Windows, and now reading the joystick name works properly there too.

The reason these libraries are built outside of the standard XFree86
tree is so that they can be linked as shared object code directly into
SDL without causing any symbol collisions with code in the application.

You can't link static library code into shared libraries on non-x86
Linux platforms.  Since these libraries haven't become standard yet,
we'll just include them directly.

These sources are synchronized with XFree86 4.2.1