Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!dg-rtp!dgcad!aeras!sun!stpeter.Eng.Sun.COM!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis@stpeter.Eng.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Finding current mouse status.
Keywords: Mouse
Message-ID: <143184@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 29 Sep 90 18:01:02 GMT
References: <1990Sep18.192348.3594@cs.umn.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Distribution: comp
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
Lines: 38

In article <1990Sep18.192348.3594@cs.umn.edu> (Russell Cattelan) writes:
>I am tring to port the programs the was orginally written for and IBM 
>The program is not interupt driven, so when it wants to find out what the 
>mouse status is it just looks at it and updateds a global structure.

A friendly way to do this is to create an input handler which simple
tracks the mouse by looking at all of the mousemove events. It should
open a public message port with some well known name like "MousePosition"
and keep with the port two shorts which contain the mouse position. Since
your code will only be reading the position you don't have to worry about
multiple writers. So your code  will look something like :

main()
	...
	struct custom_port {
		struct MsgPort	port;
		USHORT		MouseX;
		USHORT		MouseY;
	} *mp;

	mp = FindPort("MousePosition");
	if (mp == NULL) 
		/* error can't find handler's port */

	...
	MouseX = mp->MouseX;
	MouseY = mp->MouseY;
	/* etc */
}

You can kick off the input handler from your code or you can have
a separate program to do that. In 2.0 you would build a commodity
to do this fairly easily. 

--
--Chuck McManis						    Sun Microsystems
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: <none>   Internet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"I tell you this parrot is bleeding deceased!"