PPC joypad driver--controlling the gaming beast

[Reaperman93010]

I recently picked myself up a couple of Toshiba pocket PCs for $60 and $70 on ebay, and let's just say that they're exactly where I want to be. The games equal psx quality, but tend to be aimed more at my too-old-to-be-gaming market. Emulators are responsive and pleantiful--including my beloved atari 800 and commodore 64. (snes emu is a bit choppy on my units)

But for the price, the HUGE variety of uses makes me wonder why I ever thought of buying that fancy new gameboy next month. (I know I'm kidding myself, I'll be waiting in line with everybody else)



Now, getting down to business. The toshibas (and a few other systems) offer something beautiful called *USB Host Support*. yes, when I first heard it, I rolled my eyes just like you're doing. But this allows me to hook a usb device directly to the pocket pc. in my case I'm looking at joypads. The catch is, you need a driver. And I'm not holding my breath that Microsoft has included their beatiful generic joystick driver set.

As I write, I'm abusing shop bandwidth pulling down the PPC 2k3 SDK and praying that the DDK comes with it. Maybe I can use the sample code for the regular ddk (which, I'll bet includes the joystick driver) to throw one together quick.

Then my choices come in. First phase includes potato-chip clipping a standard joystick to the ppc and hooking it through the host cable. phase two includes integrating my AA battery pack (an extender) with a built in joystick (both vertical and horizontal) into a custom case.

oh yeah...

[gannon]

Sounds nice, hope you can find drivers for gamepads...