Re: [hatari-devel] Proposal: use Atari keyboard with Hatari

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 1/9/21 7:38 PM, Vincent Barrilliot wrote:
....
> It has the following limitations:
>
> * I haven't disabled the PC's keyboard and mouse handling. So you can 
> use both the PC and the Atari keyboard mouse. But if you use both at the 
> same time, multiple-byte IKBD packets will get corrupt and can lead to 
> unexpected effects in the TOS.

Could (SDL2) locking primitives be used to avoid
them getting mixed?

(That's at least something that would need to be
fixed before there's any chance of it getting to
Hatari.)


> * I added a config switch but it's hardcoded, there is no UI to 
> configure it.

That's fine.  There are also other things in
Hatari that can be enabled only from command line.


> * The serial port handling is linux-specific.
>
> * There is no error handling of what happens on the serial port.

Does it recover if there's a temporary glitch?


> I have some questions:
>
> 1 What's your view on this change ? Any chance you would ever accept to 
> merge that in hatari ? I think using keyboard/mouse is ok because you 
> can hardly loose data in case something goes wrong. It's not like using 
> a DMA device through a serial line with all the trouble that Nicolas 
> mentioned.

It seems a bit marginal, so I don't know, but send
a patch so that we we see how much changes it
implies.


> 2 I would like to add configuration. I found that there is a good 
> looking pythonui in addition to the SDL one. Why is that ? Is one of 
> them going to be retired / would I need to support both ?

As Python UI docs says, it's not going to replace
the SDL UI (and neither is Mac GUI), both have
their own pros & cons.


> 3 It works on linux only. I think I can make it work with anything that 
> support struct termios (like the RS-232 emulation does). Should I 
> refactor to make this RS232 more reusable (it currently uses some static 
> variables) or it's better to keep the external ikbd stuff a completely a 
> separate implementation ?

If it can use any external serial device, it
might have wider usage.  What the others think?


	- Eero