All but one joystick drivers didn't use IRQs. Espsecially when the joystick driver kernel was the only .interruptor this meant quite some unnecessary overhead because it pulled in the whole IRQ infrastructure.
I was told that the one driver using IRQs (the DXS/HIT-4 Player joystick driver for the C64) can be reworked to not do it. Until this is done that driver is defunct.
The change is inspired by the code of the standard joystick driver. It is however absolutely untested.
Note: Sites like http://raster.atariportal.cz/english.htm state that there needs to be a delay when reading joysticks via the MultiJoy adapter. There's no such delay in the driver. But I don't dare to decide to add it.
Up to now static drivers were created via co65 from dynamic drivers. However there was an issue with that approach:
The dynamic drivers are "o65 simple files" which obligates that they start with the 'code' segment. However dynamic drivers need to start with the module header - which is written to. For dynamic drivers this isn't more than a conceptual issue because they are always contain a 'data' segment and may therefore only be loaded into writable memory.
However when dynamic drivers are converted to static drivers using co65 then that issue becomes a real problem as then the 'code' segment may end up in non-writable memory - and thus writing to the module header fails.
Instead of changing the way dynamic drivers work I opted to rather make static driver creation totally independent from dynamic drivers. This allows to place the module header in the 'data' segment (see 'module.mac').
This change was suppsed to fix the issue that the former JUMPTABLE is merked as 'ro' while it is actually written to in several scenarios. When drivers are converted using co65 and then compiled into ROMs the JUMPTABLE isn't copied to RAM and therefore the write operations in question fail.
However unfortunately I didn't succeed in changing that :-( Just setting the former JUMPTABLE to 'rw' broke the drivers. So I placed the DATA segment directly after the former JUMPTABLE segment. This made the drivers converted with co65 work again - obviously after changing libsrc/Makefile:235 from '--code-label' to '--data-label'. But the actual dynamic drivers still didn't work as the former JUMPTABLE wasn't placed as the beginning of the loaded file anymore. That effect could be changed by exchanging src/ld65/o65.c:1391 with src/ld65/o65.c:1394 but doing so broke the drivers again :-((
As a preparation for the introduction of the 'atarixl' target it is
necessary that all drivers have a base name...
- no longer than 7 characters
- with a common prefix
mrdudz
Christian Groessler
Oliver Schmidt