SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

Date:	Sun, 29 Jun 2003 23:11:57 PDT7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Roll-your-own USB drivers

Content Type: text/plain

It's been a few years since I played around with writing OS/2 drivers.
It's really not that complicated (cough).

One of my favorite methods was to take a driver that already existed
(either OS/2 or DOS) and run it through a disassembler, then analyze the
code to see what something that actually worked was doing (the structure
of an OS/2 driver is far different than a DOS driver but the hardware
doesn't care -- it still needs the same register loads and handshakes).
IBM nicely supplies the C source code for some of their drivers and that
helps too.

Anyway, if any of you want to write an OS/2 USB driver you can start
with the DOS USB driver mentioned in the following article:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10215

I haven't checked, but IBM may already offer the source for an OS/2 USB
driver. But what fun is that? Better to screw things up by yourself, I
say, than rely on someone else's miscodings.

(I suppose I should add that a well-known SCOUG member who afaik is no
longer on this list took me to great task a while back for not pointing
out that it's not the driver that's complicated, it's the DLL that sits
between the program and the driver that causes all the hair pulling. So
now you're forewarned, and I'm off the hook.)

- Peter

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