Thread: CONTEST: Xbox Chatpad Driver Challenge

If you were serious about donating the money to charity I would be happy to whip up an installer for you...and help with anything else you might need.

Originally Posted by justchat_1

If you were serious about donating the money to charity I would be happy to whip up an installer for you...and help with anything else you might need.

I was serious (if I win, it's going to Child's Play if the donators are okay with that, aside from any money we set aside for a kernel signing license and/or a wireless controller/dongle if people want me to experiment with the wireless controller as well). The installer needs to basically implement what devcon.exe does from the WinDDK, and that's something I want to do myself so I understand how it goes. If you're knowledgeable about that then you would certainly be welcome to look over the code once I make it.

For the rest of the installer that isn't specific to the device install part, I guess a basic Windows installer that supports installing a utility program and text files to a configurable directory would be awesome since I would have to teach myself how to do that. It would need to support uninstalling as well, would preferably not muck with the Windows registry more than necessary, and would need to be able to call different .exe files as part of its installation so that they can actually install the device drivers. It should give the user the option to add a Start Menu shortcut ot the utility program (and remove it on uninstall of course). Lastly, the code would need to be written from scratch (not copied from any examples you don't own) and open-sourced under the MIT license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php).

My plan was to try to have a single executable that could be downloaded. It would automatically extract files to a temporary directory, run the proper device install code depending on the operating system version it was running under, and then delete the temporary directory when done.

I don't mind doing it on my own, but if you wanted to help with that part then the offer is appreciated.

Originally Posted by GAFBlizzard

I was serious (if I win, it's going to Child's Play if the donators are okay with that, aside from any money we set aside for a kernel signing license and/or a wireless controller/dongle if people want me to experiment with the wireless controller as well). The installer needs to basically implement what devcon.exe does from the WinDDK, and that's something I want to do myself so I understand how it goes. If you're knowledgeable about that then you would certainly be welcome to look over the code once I make it.

For the rest of the installer that isn't specific to the device install part, I guess a basic Windows installer that supports installing a utility program and text files to a configurable directory would be awesome since I would have to teach myself how to do that. It would need to support uninstalling as well, would preferably not muck with the Windows registry more than necessary, and would need to be able to call different .exe files as part of its installation so that they can actually install the device drivers. It should give the user the option to add a Start Menu shortcut ot the utility program (and remove it on uninstall of course). Lastly, the code would need to be written from scratch (not copied from any examples you don't own) and open-sourced under the MIT license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php).

My plan was to try to have a single executable that could be downloaded. It would automatically extract files to a temporary directory, run the proper device install code depending on the operating system version it was running under, and then delete the temporary directory when done.

I don't mind doing it on my own, but if you wanted to help with that part then the offer is appreciated.

NSIS is the way to go....free, great compression ratios, single exe and its pretty easy to work with even for beginners.

For device installation, your going to need to dive into the setup APIs. I've done it a few dozens times and I still get lost so if you want to do it on your own i'll have to try and dig up code samples for you.

On Vista and Win7-its nice and easy:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=VS.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=VS.85).aspx

win2000 and XP are here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=VS.85).aspx

although be warned you may have to enumerate device chains to get all the data you need. Final note (although i'm sure you already know), keep in mind devcon.exe is not redistributable.

Originally Posted by justchat_1

NSIS is the way to go....free, great compression ratios, single exe and its pretty easy to work with even for beginners.

Thanks very much for the info!

although be warned you may have to enumerate device chains to get all the data you need. Final note (although i'm sure you already know), keep in mind devcon.exe is not redistributable.

Yeah, I'm expecting to go through enumeration etc. basically following the steps devcon does. I believe it has binaries for each platform so hopefully I only have to write one set of source code. Thanks!

Originally Posted by GAFBlizzard

basically following the steps devcon does. I believe it has binaries for each platform so hopefully I only have to write one set of source code. Thanks!

In that case take a look at %DDK Directory%\Src\Setup\Devcon. Thats the full devcon source and you can pretty much copy the install portion of it. I would recommend the new apis for vista+ though since it provides a more native feel to the installation, you get progress dialogs and if anything goes wrong it tries to automatically work around the problem. At 2 API calls it shouldn't be much more overhead.

Originally Posted by justchat_1

In that case take a look at %DDK Directory%\Src\Setup\Devcon. Thats the full devcon source and you can pretty much copy the install portion of it. I would recommend the new apis for vista+ though since it provides a more native feel to the installation, you get progress dialogs and if anything goes wrong it tries to automatically work around the problem. At 2 API calls it shouldn't be much more overhead.

Yep, using the devcon source as an example is the plan.

I'll look into adding those two API calls instead of whatever devcon does, though. Thanks again.

I say to set some money to get a wireless reciever and controller to continue to dev for wireless support and the rest for the donation/signing the drivers.

keep up the good work GAFBlizzard.

EDIT: Im playing a game called "MineCraft"

very addicting

chatpad be nice to chat to people xD

I am also a fan of Minecraft (http://www.minecraft.net), and if anyone else is considering getting it, you might want to do so soon before it goes into beta and the price goes up. If you buy it in alpha then you get all future updates/expansion packs for free. It's an interesting game.

I did not realize it had controller support, or are you using something like XPadder to play it?

For chatpad driver progress, I imagine no one is happy with me being so slow. I did not have that great of a weekend in general, but I did finally finish up the chatpad and HID keyboard items on my to-do list. The main thing of note that took me quite a while to nail down was reworking how I filter data from the chatpad so that I handle rapidly repeated keys a little better. It's still not perfect, and I'm not really happy with that, but I hope it may be good enough, and I don't want to spend more time on it until I release it and see if people complain. Fair warning: If you press backspace really quickly to delete a bunch of letters, the driver may occasionally miss a backspace press. Otherwise, I'm hoping it will work quite well for everyone.

After wrapping that up, I backed up the project state and moved on to create the HID mouse interface. It is very similar to how the HID keyboard interface works in some ways, so a lot of the code is set up. I know people probably want me to release something as soon as possible without finishing the mouse part, but I really want that done first. I don't think it will be that bad. Things left to do for the mouse interface:

* Finish HID descriptor stuff so the virtual mouse device appears in device manager properly, and the virtual mouse driver can accept commands from userspace. (1 day to do?)

* Link the virtual mouse driver to my control utility, and make sure I can move the mouse, click buttons, and use the scroll wheel. (1 day to do?)

* Make the virtual mouse usable via the controller/config file/control utility mechanism, and make sure everything works well. (1-3 days to do, hopefully) (This is also where I would test again in say, Mirror's Edge)


After all this works well, I should probably go ahead and get the driver and Windows installer code done, and make sure it works on both Vista 64 and XP 32 (my test systems). I need to possibly clean up some final debug code/printouts. I need to make sure that all my files have the explicit MIT license reference in the headers, and that I have a copy of the license for release. Then, depending on how long everything has taken, I can either release an early test version or wrap up the final controller features I wanted to add before release.

As always, thanks for your patience. And thanks to this forum for having so many smileys I can use.

Take your time!

Thank you for trying so hard to give everyone a great product.