Small asm program in background to reset via joypad?
 

Hi coders of the Amiga,

I was wondering if it would be possible to make a small program that would run in the background, check for a joypad button combination every few secs, and reset the machine if it is pressed?

It would have to very efficient so that it wouldn't slow down games noticeably.
It would be started from WB.
Target machine is the cd32, to make for a comfy couch-compatible reset button as opposed to the physical one on the machine.
Button combo should be like play+left+both shoulders to possibly avoid any ingame combo.

Unfortunately I don't have the skills to do this (although @mcgeezer is working on it ;) ).

So, could any gentleman do this? Is it technically possible at all?

I don’t think it is possible, if the game is system friendly a program could be use used I guess but you’ll have to load it first and I don’t think many games are system friendly. Maybe with an added hardware...

Ah okay. It's not the end of the world to get up and press a button after all. Thanks for your input.

you would still need to get up to change the CD :laughing

I use a CF card, boot into Workbench with joymouse so that I can control the mouse. Then launch any whdload game just like you would on a desktop Amiga. E. g. using iGame. I also have some hd installs that don't need whdload.
No cd's most of the time :)

CD32load does that. So if you're using a CD32load compilation you're able to reset just by pressing (AFAIR) rev+fwd+all color buttons. You don't have to change the CD either: it's a compilation.

Whdload also has a joypad quit option. Now most updated slaves also can be quit to WB using a joypad combination.

What you're talking about would be possible, though. With games not zeroing the VBR, the program could install & just scan the joypad, then redirect VBR to 0 like whdload/jst do. But that's a lot of work for a minor feature.

Here is a reset routine i found in the autodocs if someone wants to tinker around with it.

Edit: Assembled it. Works fine -> so now I have a reset.exe in C: :D

Edit2: No idea how to check the gamepad (not speaking of staying low cpu and system friendly) in asm or blitz (gameb() command?), so sorry for the moment.

Looks like from v18.4 WHDLoad supports quitting by pressing play+forward+reverse. I'll certainly give that a try. That would solve ~3/4 of my quitting needs :)

enable that only if slave itself doesn't have joypad support. If it has joypad support, either it has quit support or it hasn't, in which case don't hesitate to request it since it's a trivial change (if the source of the slave is accessible :))

Alright, where should I post quit key requests? :)

Also -and I know this is offtopic- there's a couple of CD32-specific titles that would play 100% with WHDLoad but don't exist atm. E.g. Frontier, James Pond 3, Pinball Prelude I can quickly think of - these have no proper pad support with WHDLoad but their original versions did AFAIK.
So, can we post requests for these somewhere as well? They're done when they're done, no rush obviously, just asking :)

only answer: mantis.whdload.de

Working on restoring James Pond 3 joypad controls BTW

OK thanks

wow thank you :great