Touch screen as an input area

[flag]

Hi Tinnus,

i was playing Simcity in ljp when i thought it would be nice
to use the touch screen as an input area.
Imagine this:

you tap on the Enery Plant icon with your stylus,
Simcity select it (as the pointer moved immediately on that icon
and you pressed a button).
Now i tap somewhere around the screen and you
deploy the energy plant where yo tapped.
And so on.
What do you think?

Incidentally i found that Snes Simcty doesn't support snes mouse
(Simcity 2k fixed it but the implementation was really bad),
so emulating the snes mouse in this case won't be enough, but a
little "touch screen" layer on top of the normal snes input
layer would be doable, don't you think?

Kiitos,
Paolo

edit:

according to wikipedia Simcity 2000 didn't have mouse support,
so maybe i'm wrong on that...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNES_Mouse

[frankk]

I dont know if it is possible to use stilus as mouse pointer in the emulator, but I'd like to notice you that there is a native PalmOS version of SimCity, search around for version 1.7p.

Bye
Frankk

[Tinnus]

Short answer: No, this is not reasonably doable.

Long answer: This is doable but it's too much work for just one game.

Long, long answer: The only way to do this would be "tricking" the game into thinking the pointer is at a certain position. To do that, we would need to track all the RAM addresses the game uses, find out where it stores the current mouse coordinates, find out IF they are stored in a somewhat meaningful way (maybe it's done a way that simply makes it impossible), then fnd out HOW they are stored: ie: 8 bit, 16, bit, signed, unsigned, 0-100, 0-30, 0-256, etc. Then we would have to translate the screen taps into the values in the emulated RAM, taking into account the current screen size and mode.

So, as you see, not practical just for one game

edit: of course any SimCity fanatics are welcome to work on that and send me a patch

[_Em]

You might want to check out what the Phoinix guys have done; they don't use the stylus as a pointing device, but as a joystick/trackpad interface; no matter where you tap, the starting position is always where the cursor currently is; then you can either use trackpad-like strokes to move it around, or you can set it like a joystick where it always snaps back to the original location when you remove the stylus from the screen. Seems like a good use of the silkscreen to me (LJP already uses the game screen for other functions)