Remote Wonder Multiuser "Patch"

[TheGrandPoobah]

Hi All,

This is my first time posting on Rage3D, but I have written an application that I thought the people on this forum would find useful. I had been experiencing problems when trying to use the ATI Remote Wonder in conjuction with the Fast User Switch functionality of Windows XP and no amount of driver installation/uninstallation/3rd party software was doing it, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. Specifically, the Remote Wonder only seems to work correctly for the first user who has logged into the computer. The reason for the bug is that a portion of the infamous X10 driver is loaded whenever a user logs into the system and grabs an exclusive lock on the X10 Remote Control device driver. The solution that I have found is to "recycle" the userspace portion of the driver whenever a Fast User Switch takes place in Windows. I wrote a little utility called X10Recycler that terminates the relevent X10 processes and reloads them. You can find the program in the link in my signature since the Rage3D forum software doesn't let me post a link without making at least 5 posts first. It installs itself as a startup application for all the users on the computer and "recycles" the X10 processes whenever necessary. I can give a more technical explanation if anybody is interested.

I have tested the program with an ATI Remote Wonder running version 3.04 of the ATI Remote Wonder driver. The program obviously only works for the X10 based drivers for the Remote Wonder and I am not sure what the older driver (2.5 was it?) used. I used both the ATI Remote Wonder controller application and RW Master. Technically, it should work with any programs that interact with an X10 product (PowerDVD 7's Remote applet comes to mind), but I have not tested it yet.

As always, make backups and use at your own risk, and please let me know if you find it useful or if you find problems. I'll try to fix them as they come and release newer versions.. that is if people are actually using it .

EDIT: Okay, so I can't seem my own signature so I am not sure if it is there or not, but just in case, my "Homepage" link in my profile leads to the application.

 

[ShadowFlare_SFR]

Hmm, I've been interested in writing a total replacement for the Remote Wonder app. Would this interface with the same types of things that my own program would need to be able to work independently of ATI's app?

 

[TheGrandPoobah]

So the Remote Wonder "driver" consists of two parts. One of them is the X10 Kernel Mode USB Driver (KMD)/COM Server object, and the second is the ATI Remote Wonder application which acts as a COM client and connects to the X10 COM Server and receives notifications of the keypresses on the Remote Control. It then acts on these key presses based on the available plug-ins and default actions.

The interface for a COM Client is relatively well documented and should be "easy" to replace. In fact, there are several ATI Remote Wonder application replacements on line written in various languages (Delphi, C#, and C++). unfortunately the names escape me right now. The KMD would probably be much harder to replace, but if you have the necessary Windows DDK experience, then you should be able to port over the Linux open-source driver.

The reason I wrote my X10Recycler application is because the X10 COM Server only accepts one Client at a time and each logged in user counts as a client. Its rather stupid in general, because the Driver should be a "Human Interface Device" class driver, which would get rid of so many problems with the Remote Control, but alas, ATI didn't bother writing a proper driver for it and just went this path.

I hope that rambling helped answer your question.