Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf_Rider
they (JS makers) all use USB drivers licensed from a single source - yes? and each joystick manufacturer has the common courtesy to not tap into another maker's programming software - yes?
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Not from the beginning, no.
Joysticks first ran on a nine pin Atari interface, I'm not sure whether that was released or hacked but it was used on pretty much all 8 bit and a lot of 16 bit computers. It was also used for Atari ST and Amiga mice, with different APIs, so you needed a switch on a third party mouse if the maker wanted users to be able to use it on both the ST and Amiga (I'm not really sure why Atari and Commodore allowed 3rd party mice, perhaps because the originals were shit enough to stop people buying the computers if they couldn't upgrade to something better). Then came sound card based PC joysticks, which were exclusively analogue and used a load more pins. I suspect the API for that belonged to IBM, or maybe Creative, but it was used for most joysticks at that time. USB is an open standard I'm pretty sure, created by the makers of all the devices which were intended to be connected to it, it's certainly not Microsoft's exclusive property.