[SDL] adding wacom tablet support to sdl

[Bob Pendleton]

This thread piqued my curiosity. About 20 years ago I had to interface a
wacom tablet to a Sun workstation. At that time wacom was perfectly open
with the interface specification. The manual had details of the byte
stream the device emitted and the command codes needed to command the
device. When I started the project I thought I would have to write a
device driver, but it turned out all I needed was a little code that
used the existing serial driver. A project that was scheduled to take
over a month took only a couple of days. :-)

So, I have a couple of questions. Is wacom not providing interface
information now days? How is the device connected, USB, serial port,
mouse port,... what? Just curiosity. I really liked the wacom tablets.
High precision, good repeatability, easy to program for.

		Bob Pendleton

On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 17:06 -0700, Doug wrote:
> In article <43e577b10610041600k4695a581o9402029fafd905a0 at mail.gmail.com>, 
> acbreton at gmail.com says...
> >I'm interested in having support for wacom pen tablets directly built into
> >SDL. I did a couple of searches, and it appears that this issue popped up a
> >couple of times in the past, but nothing happened at the end.
> 
> Interesting.  My kid has a Wacom tablet, and I never though that it could be 
> useful for doing SDL-fun-stuff.
> 
> I found the Wacom Developers FAQ quite informative...
> 
> http://www.wacomeng.com/devsupport/ibmpc/wacomwindevfaq.html
> 
> Some interesting points to note from the FAQ...
> 
> There is very little you must do to support virtually all Wacom's tablet 
> models ... Once you have added Wintab support for one tablet, your program 
> should work with virtually any Wacom tablets.
> 
> Except for a few features, your code should also work without change with 
> other tablet manufacturer's tablets too, if they use Wintab.
> 
> Wintab is the industry standard for acquiring data from a graphics tablet on 
> Intel machines and has been the standard for a number of years.
> 
> ***---> Unfortunately, there is no cross-platform graphics tablet API.
> 
> 
> So, it appears that tablet support (in general, not just Wacom) is a 
> cake-walk for Win32 platforms, as there is a standard API.  Other platforms 
> may be challenging or perhaps impossible, as it depends on how much low-level 
> information Wacom (or other tablet makers) provide.  Also, once you leave the 
> Win32 platform, you'll probably have to consider writing device drivers to 
> support a tablet, unless such a driver has already been written for the 
> target platform.
> 
> Doug.
> 
> 
> 
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> 
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