I've been working on implementing outputs for use in external programs such as MameHooker. My primary interest is in driving games with force feedback wheels.
Something I've come up against is that in src/osd/windows/input.c (lines 1510 and 1517) the joysticks are acquired exclusively. Keyboards and mice are acquired non-exclusively but joysticks are acquired exclusively. This is a problem for external programs that want to write to those same devices since to do so they need exclusive access as well.
So, is there a particular reason that MAME acquires joysticks with exclusive access? Changing it to non-exclusive is pretty simple and when I did so nothing catastrophic happened that I could tell.
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