Offtopic: simulating a keystroke

fb (fb@chibacity.com)
Thu, 7 Aug 1997 20:16:06 -0500 (EST)


Hello all, I know that this is off topic and i appoligize in advance and
will accept any flames.

I currently find myself rebooting to windows95 in order to play quake and
doom in an environment where i can use my joystick (a gravis game pad)
I was thinking one day and wondered what would be involved in writing a
configurable daemon to watch the joystick and simulate keystrokes
according to the state of the stick and the buttons.

This would allow a user to use a joystick on virtually any game that used
the keyboard, for instance if in quake you pressed the space bar to jump,
you could configure the daemon to simulate a press of the space bar when
button 1 was pressed.

Ok, now here's the tricky part :) How should I go about simulating a
keystroke in a way that it will be transparent to all applications? (ie
the program that recieves the key press will not know that its a simulated
one)

Because of my lack of kernel knowledge I was thinking about trying to go
at it by tackling the keyboard controller, but I am not sure if this is
the right way or not.

Anyway if anyone would like to help I would greatly appreciate it or if
anyone had any _constructive_ suggestions that would be great also.

Thanks
Nick
fb@chibacity.com