Generic mouse?

[Robert E. Carneal]

I have several routines for the mouse that are +very+ specific-
that is, it is written assuming the mouse is two- button, or is
three-button, and specifically expects the mouse to be connected
to the com port so specified in the routine.

Mouse use programming is new to me. Is there a general routine
that will "look" for the mouse (even if it is plugged into USB),
and at least the left & right buttons will work regardless of
the brand of mouse (Logitech, Microsoft, Gateway, etc.)??

While I have a five button optical mouse, all I really need is
for the program to recognize the left and right mouse buttons,
and where on the screen it was clicked or double-clicked.

Is a working generic routine of this possible?

Thank you.

Robert Carneal

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[Lance Edmonds]

Generally speaking, mouses (not mice!) will come with a DOS "driver", and these usually always provide an INT &H33 interface.

Therefore, it should not be relevant whether the mouse is a USB, Serial, or uses some other interface method, as long as the driver provides an INT &H33 interface. If your code uses the INT &H33 interface (ala, MOUSUNIT.BAS, etc), then you should have no problems.


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Robert E. Carneal]

Therefore, it should not be relevant whether the mouse is a
USB, Serial, or uses some other interface method, as long as
the driver provides an INT &H33 interface. If your code uses
the INT &H33 interface (ala, MOUSUNIT.BAS, etc), then you should
have no problems.

Lance-

I follow what you are saying. My mouse is a USB but when I use
MOUSEUNIT, it fails. That is what made me think USB mouses did
not work. Now, based on what you are saying, I would say I am
probably not using MOUSEUNIT properly. When I compile, it says
"Cannot compile as unit."

Hmm, how would I find out if the mouse driver uses an INT &H33
interface? It is an optical mouse, if that makes a difference.
I am not sure what that error means yet.

Thank you.




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[Robert E. Carneal]

Lance- yay- Mouseunit works. It is +me+ that is not using it
correctly. Rather than print possibly copyrighted code here,
let me try this. When I use the procedure MsButtons it returns
to me the correct number of buttons. [5] When I use IsThere,
however, it returns a negative number. Shouldn't that number be
positive to indicate True? [I automatically think Positive is
true, and negative is false.]

When I use MsStatus,however, it threw a curve ball at me. It
said I may need "ByCopy."

I didn't see that in the user's guide nor the help. What is that
and how do I use it? Do I need it to get the location of mouse
when a left/right button was pressed? (I won't say ByCopy is not
in the user's guide, because every time I say something is not
in the guide I get shot down. )

Thank you.

[This message has been edited by Robert Carneal (edited February 22, 2003).]

[Clay Clear]

Robert,

FYI, returning a negative number (usually "-1") is the equivalent
in the programming world of returning a positive number to indicate
a TRUE result. To my knowledge, returning a zero ("0") is always
the case when returning FALSE.



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[Michael Mattias]

PB/DOS has the ISTRUE and ISFALSE functions; IMO it would a good habit to use these functions instead of "equals" when testing for true or false conditions.

MCM

[Davide Vecchi]

Robert,

It said I may need "ByCopy."

ByCopy is a way of passing parameters to a procedure, just like ByVal or ByRef, so in the docs it's under CALL and / or SUB / FUNCTION (i don't remember exactely now).

If you get the above error message you should check the type of parameters in the call against the parameters in the procedure definition.

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Davide Vecchi
[email protected]

[Robert E. Carneal]

This is for Clay Clear please.

Clay-

returning a negative number (usually "-1") is the equivalent
in the programming world of returning a positive number to indicate
a TRUE result.

I was trained as a programmer back in the days prior to Windows.
At the college where I went, the professors drilled into us:
-1 (or any negative number) False
0 (zero)Error
1 (or any positive number) True

I guess it was professor specific, but that is where my
programming "habits" came from. Thanks for clearing that up- I
would still be considering that false if you had not written.

Robert

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[Gary Akins]

What language was your professor trying to teach?

I got my start way back in the days of the old TRS-80 Model I, and TRUE has always been indicated by an integer "-1" (and FALSE, always by integer "0") in every dialect of BASIC I've ever tangled with...

(IIRC, this has to do with the various functions, such as IF/THEN, returning a 2-byte integer value consisting of either all bits high for TRUE, or all bits low for FALSE, and this return value subsequently being interpreted and displayed by the BASIC interpreter as a signed integer...)

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[Robert E. Carneal]

Gary- I am allowing the thread to get off subject- but to
answer your question, he was teaching "Compact" which later
became todays C++, PL1, and one I have never seen
anywhere but at that school called PB (Not powerbasic, but
PERSONAL Basic), Fortran (prior to Fortran 77), Cobol, assembler,
dBase, RPG, etc. He had a rule- If IBM did not recognize the
language for their programming department- he would not teach it.

Had the school had another programming professor, I believe I
would have realized which habits where professor preferred. As
it was, he was anti-Microsoft I never saw a Win operating system
until after I graduated.

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