Category : A Collection of Games for DOS and Windows
Archive   : JOYFORCE.ZIP
Filename : JOYFORCE.DOC
Terry Bohning
11851 NW 37 Place
Sunrise, FL 33323
Compuserve [71036,1066]
original: 11/4/88
Rev. 1: 11/8/88
Corrected an error in the DEBUG source
was:
or byte ptr [0411],16 ;game port indicator is bit 4 of high byte
changed to
or byte ptr [0411],10 ;game port indicator is bit 4 of high byte
since DEBUG uses hex, not decimal.
Note that JOYFORCE.COM was OK, just the doc was wrong.
Force System Recognition of Joystick
Recently I fired up my AT clone's game port for the first time since
I purchased it and discovered that Striker, one of my favorite
public domain games, would not work with a joystick.
After quite a few hours of work, I found that the DOS
Equipment Check Call (INT 11H) was saying that there was
no game port! I examined my old XT BIOS source code and
found that the equipment flag is a word stored at 00:0410.
Bit 12 of the word signifies whether there is a game port
or not.
The BIOS sets this at power up based upon whether there is a
stick attached to the port or not. So if you boot up without
your stick attached, you don't have a game port.
Well, in my case, it didn't seem to matter whether the stick
was there at power-up or not, it just didn't work.
I keyed the program shown below in under DEBUG (minus
the comments of course) , saved it as JOYFORCE.COM
and now Striker works fine.
C>DEBUG
-a100
xor ax,ax ;equipment flag is in segment 0
mov ds,ax ;set Data Segreg to 0
;high byte of equipment flag is at 0x411
or byte ptr [0411],10 ;game port indicator is bit 4 of high byte
int 20 ;terminate program
-rcx
CX 0000
:0b
-njoyforce.com
-w
Writing 000B bytes
-q
C>
/********************* EOF *************************/
Very nice! Thank you for this wonderful archive. I wonder why I found it only now. Long live the BBS file archives!
This is so awesome! 😀 I’d be cool if you could download an entire archive of this at once, though.
But one thing that puzzles me is the “mtswslnkmcjklsdlsbdmMICROSOFT” string. There is an article about it here. It is definitely worth a read: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mtswslnk/