WinUAE and the Microsoft Surface
 

I own a Surface Pro 4, and it's just now occurred to me that I could conceivably install Amiga Forever on this thing and play Lemmings with a touchscreen interface, which has been a dream since basically forever.

The question is, though, do WinUAE and Amiga Forever play nice with touchscreen devices like the Surface? Does anybody have any experience in this area? Or am I flying blind?

Unfortunately it is not possible without game specific hacks.

Touch screen/drawing tablets send absolute coordinates (absolute pixel position) but mouse is relative device ("mouse moved 5 units left from previous position", there is no origin or absolute start position and software's mouse movement unit to pixel mapping can be anything or even dynamic (mouse acceleration).

Generic conversion between different devices is not possible if program takes over the system (like most games). Only fix is game specific patches that directly inject absolute coordinate to game's internal mouse (x,y) position variables.

Surface Laptop would work but it’s not a tablet.

Install TabletPro (lets you use whole screen as mouse).
Set WinUAE to windowed mode (with no borders) and align so, you have a one line gap top or bottom (allows it to not take over every control, forcing you to reset if you dont).


It works great. You can even use tablet pros onscreen xbox controller if needed.

Surface is a tablet, with the option to attach keyboard.

There are several Surface types:
- Surface Pro is a tablet that can have a keyboard attached
- Surface Book is a laptop (with a touchscreen) that can have its screen detached & work as a tablet
- Surface Laptop is a laptop with a touchscreen (screen cannot be detached from the keyboard)

There are ports of ScummVM to devices with touchscreens (like smartphones, gaming devices), I wonder how they implemented the mouse moves.

@Tony wouldn't it be possible to have WinUAE send a mousemove + mouseclick once the user taps somewhere on the screen ? This way WinUAE could have basic support for these touch devices, at least for basic Workbench operations.

Workbench and system friendly software works fine with tablet input. I used it with my wacom for example and it works just fine in DPaint,XiPaint or ArtEffect(no working pressure support yet afaik).

It's only software that bangs the HW directly, like most games, that won't work with tablet or touchscreen input.

Workbench or better input.device can handle the data and translate it to a valid pointer position but most games just ignore it because they expect mouse data.

The problem is that the tablet has to know the resolution of the screen to tell the pointer to go to position x:1220,y:783 for example with one corer of the sceen as 0 for x,x and a mouse is just telling the pointer go 1 pixel left,right,up or down. Most(all) Amiga games expect the latter one.

But that mentioned input wrapper and a borderless window mode for the emulator sounds like it may work.
From how I understand it the Windows and Amiga mouse have the same position in that scenario even if both use different resolutions. So where ever you toch the screen the mouse will be at this very position inside the emulation window,too.