Posted by Andy Warne on 9, 2001 at 10:47 AM:
In Reply to: I made the program (read on) posted by EmuMannen on 6, 2001 at 7:57 PM:
Just to add to Rob's comments: I am happy for IpacUtil to be open source. I have already fully documented the protocol and will post this on my site, or to anyone who is interested.
As Rob says, providing there is a way of controlling the 3 keyboard LEDs on the MAC then it's possible! I would love to see this done!
Andy
: Hi JustinT
: I made the program and traded the copyright to Andy. The problem is that Andy doesn't have the sorce code yet (because I am lazy and I haven't taken the time to zip it up and document it properly).
: Andy wanted a DOS program but I am mainly coding Windows applications these days so I had a hard time to choose a compiler. I started out in DJGPP but I am spoiled and I just find that kind of development environment not productive enough if you have a family and mainly program on you spare time. I finally digged out an old copy of Borland Pascal 7.1 and lots of snippets of code from my programming days at university. So the code is in Turbo Pascal but with a lot of inline assembler. I am also using a lot of old VGA mode 13h tricks to make the GUI work on most platforms and video cards.
: I think it is quite hard to port it to Mac as it is but the protocol is quite simple so it is probably easier to make a new native Mac application from scratch. The core in my application is the low level communication routines between the PC and the keyboard controllers. This is not done the same way on a Mac, is it? So more or less everything from file I/O, video and keyboard communication differ between PC/DOS and a Mac so the language doesen't really matter in this case (maybe strait ANSI C would have made it easier but I don't know about C on Mac).
: Making an application that does the same thing as IPACUTIL on a Mac should be quite simple if you only know how to communicate with the keyboard on a low level (that would probably have to be done trough USB on a Mac, would't it?). Talk to Andy about the protocol and if you can have the source (Andy has the copyright so I can't send it to you, and I also have to sent it to him in the first place... I have to kick my own butt I bit...)
: don't give up on this because it can't be that hard really... I will help you as much as I can but I havn't programmed the Mac in over 15 years...
: / EmuMannen
: : I asked this before, but forgot the answer from Andy... and I couldn't find the specific thread on the archives.
: : Andy:
: : Who made the i=pac programmeable software? I would like to try to port this to mac, but that would depend on what the source code is originally programmed in.
: : Let me know,
: : -JustinT