Thrustmaster, Inc.

Guillemot Corporation

Robert L Church

Frank M Bouton

Stephen T Kaminsky

Louis A Ashford

Doyle A Nickless

Joseph C Rayhawk

The invention uses the conventional PC game port as a port for a digital game input device, employing a Digital Game Port (DGP) protocol which uses the four discrete or button lines and a single analog line (one of four) on the conventional game board to form a dual serial port. Data from a DGP control device is packetized with each packet consisting of 13 bytes of data. The packets or blocks are then grouped into frames. A frame consists of two blocks of data. A total of two frames are transmitted to the driver for each driver request. The 13-byte data block is divided between six one byte analog values and four bytes of digital data, with three bytes that identify and define the device. This device definition and identification is unique. By sending the device identification and configuration to the driver, the driver can determine not only the presence of the device but also very specific aspects of the device. The hardware configuration of the cable enables the driver to uniquely identify the first unit connected to the host computer as the master unit. The driver identifies the other units, if any, as slave units. Up to 3 additional slave units may be chained from the master digital game port input device by such cables.

Method for bi-directional data communication in a digital game port

A high precision game card generates a digital signal corresponding to each analog input signal from a controller. Each digital signal has a digital value proportional to the number of 'reads' to the game card by a computer microprocessor. The digital signals can therefore be read by the computer without disabling the computer interrupts. The game card converts the analog input signals to a corresponding numeric value and this value is compared with an output of a counter which counts the number of 'reads' by the computer. If the number of 'reads' equals or exceeds the numeric representation, the corresponding digital signal is deasserted. The digital signals are initially asserted responsive to a 'write' to the game card by the computer microprocessor. Alternatively, the numeric representations can be provided directly to the computer over the computer data bus. This embodiment provides all of the numeric representations over a single address.

Video game card having interrupt resistant behavior

Growing community of inventors

Tujunga, CA, United States of America

Robert L Church