Device Drivers

Defining Devices

 

Depending on the associated device, device driver code will begin with one of the following directives:

 

DEFPRT (chan) col, ln

For a printer device

 

     or

 

DEFTTY (chan) col, ln

For a terminal device

DEFTTY and DEFPRT tell PxPlus that the channel opened is either a terminal or a printer and will give you the FIN( ) information back in either terminal format or printer format. It uses the column and line information to give you some starting values to use, if you query the FIN( ), MXC( ) and MXL( ) functions.

See DEFTTY and DEFPRT.

*DEV and *UDEV Directories

The associated device driver file must be located in the PxPlus *DEV directory (e.g. /pvx/lib/_dev) and is referenced via *DEV/xxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxx is the name of the driver specified. Driver names are limited to 12 characters in length, lowercase only. If the driver cannot be located, this may result in an Error #100 - No driver for terminal type or library missing.

If you plan to customize one of the drivers supplied with PxPlus, it is not recommended that you resave the driver using the same file name in *DEV. Unfortunately, the PxPlus installation process will automatically overwrite these files and you will lose all changes.

For terminal drivers, you have the option of using the *UDEV directory (e.g. /pvx/lib/_udev) to store customized drivers. This option is not available for printer device drivers.

See Creating a Supplemental Device Driver.