Hi !

On Sat, 5 Aug 2000, Rink Springer wrote:
> Remind me of myself... I've made a cable from my printer port to the game
> port of my Commodore 64. Couldn't find a joystick for it, so I made a small
> program that reads the PC joystick and tosses the corrects pins high and low
> :). I've also hooked a LCD display to my PC (for some reason, the LCD died
> yesterday... guess a bad wire touched another one or something... *sniff*).

Was it one of those Hitachi somewhat controlled 2x16 chars displays? I have a
box full of them here and want to put one into my fileserver due to i had to
discard the floppy for some space for the raid controller :-) BTW: I have
3 Competition Pro's lying around here, and several other Joysticks for the
C64 :-)

> Anyhow, while reading this, I was wondering: how do I directly write the
> pins using NetBSD *and* FreeBSD? I don't care about Linux, I never liked
> that.  FreeBSD and NetBSD for me!

Linux is a bit... Windows-like. Too chaotic programming in the kernel, but this
doesn't belong here. In FreeBSD you should have a look at the ppi manpage, i
think this was the interface to really control the port directly. Maybe we
should take this part to NetBSD, as [Free|Open]BSD took the NetBSD-sources
for some VAX-related porting actions. (I saw some of my comments in OpenBSD,
but i never programmed for OpenBSD :-)
ppi(4) is a very cute API to control the parallel port directly under FreeBSD.
If this can go to NetBSD/vax is another question, there i don't know the
specs of the parallel ports, which only seems to be present on some VAXstations.
I not even can tell about the kernel knowing about it...

...Michael

-- 
void windows() { while(status == SYS_RUNNING) { sleep(rand()); bluescreen(); }}