Keyboard handling under OS4

Hello, I'm getting bug reports from members of my OS4 userbase, reporting that keyboard input is being ignored. It works fine on OS3.9 and MOS. So I'm wondering if something has changed for keyboard.device under OS4? The OS4 SDK implies that it hasn't.
I searched the forums here for guidance, but this is all I found:


Does this mean that keyboard input on OS4 might not always go through keyboard.device? If that's the case, what would be the recommended method to get the up/down state of all keys?
I assume that reading IntuitionBase->ActiveWindow is still the best way to get the active window?
Here's the function in question.

EXPORT void readkybd(void)
{ ULONG IBaseLock, i;
struct Window* ActiveWindowPtr;

IBaseLock = LockIBase(0);
ActiveWindowPtr = IntuitionBase->ActiveWindow;
UnlockIBase(IBaseLock);

if
( ActiveWindowPtr == MainWindowPtr
|| (ControlsWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == ControlsWindowPtr)
|| ( DIPsWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == DIPsWindowPtr)
|| (GameInfoWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == GameInfoWindowPtr)
|| ( MonitorWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == MonitorWindowPtr)
|| ( MemoryWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == MemoryWindowPtr)
|| ( PaletteWindowPtr && ActiveWindowPtr == PaletteWindowPtr)
)
{ // Strangely, this only seems to work if KeyMatrix is dynamically
// allocated.
KybdIO->io_Command = KBD_READMATRIX;
KybdIO->io_Length = 16;
KybdIO->io_Data = (APTR) KeyMatrix;

DISCARD DoIO((struct IORequest *) KybdIO);
} else
{ for (i = 0; i < 16; i++)
{ KeyMatrix[i] = 0;
} } }

I guess it's better to use IIntuition->GetScreenInfo() with the SA_ActiveWindow tag.

Minuous

No it's not, under OS4 at least. As of V50 there's an Intuition function, GetScreenAttr(), that you can use to obtain your value - so there's no need (and is generally discouraged) to peek a system structure directly. See Intuition autodocs for more info.

OK, thanks, I will make this change and see if it helps.

Just got word back from my betatester, this call is OK, it seems to be the KBD_READMATRIX that is the problem.

(Regarding the ActiveWindow issue, I need a screen pointer to give the GetScreenAttr(SA_ActiveWindow) to get a meaningful result. So I imagine I would need to read that out of IntuitionBase->ActiveScreen, which defeats the purpose :-(
Anyway, according to the intuitionbase.h comments, reading the public part of the structure is still considered legal.)

Yes, it is legal, but it's deprecated.

You can find your Screenpointer in struct Window (WScreen).

BTW:
The best way would be to wait for IDCMP_ACTIVEWINDOW IDCMP messages.

OK, I've rewritten the keyboard handling to entirely avoid the use of keyboard.device.
But nevertheless it does seem that there is some kind of OS4 bug which prevents KBD_READMATRIX from working correctly, the code is system-legal AFAICT and works fine on OS3.9 and MorphOS.
I might add that this is not the first such workaround that I have had to implement to avoid OS4 bugs. It was my impression that the OS4 team has access to OS3.x source code so I'm not sure why they introduced these bugs, they can't be just faulty reverse engineering.

I'm surprised that there is no interest from the OS4 dev team in fixing this, it strikes me as a pretty serious bug, one of the most important .devices is basically useless...?