I ended up going back to DirectX. I found a program that creates a full-screen black display and a program to move the cursor with the joystick and I am trying to integrate the two. Finding out what is common between them is really helping to illustrate what is necessary for DirectX development and what's there for the specific task each jobber is trying to accomplish.

Of course, I was up until 2:00am last night trying to get them to integrate, couldn't get it to work, went to sleep, got no sleep, woke up and am brutally tired. It's brings me back to the days of learning Hugo.

I have another snippet that deals with joysticks, so I'll run through that and see what the deal is. I will be the happiest man in the world once I can have a bitmap controlled by the joystick in fullscreen 640x480.

DirectX now treats 2D in a "3D way", apparently. You pretty much have to do it by implementing sprites a milimitre infront of the backround, etc.

I hated when it did it the (easy to program) 2D way, because DreictX isn't optimised for it and 2D programmes ran like shit. With DirectX8+, tho, if you can GET THE DAMN THING TO WORK, 2D programmes can run as optimised 3D ones.

See: Crimsonland.

Wow, Directx programming is a giant pain in the ass.

Here's an update of things I've found:

o There is NO tutorial for DirectX 9, Visual Studio .NET 2003, C++ and setting up a 2D game. Even the site 2DGameTutorial.com is worthless.

So much of my frustration has come from the fact that nobody is doing what I am trying to do. Not that things aren't riddled with bugs from Microsoft's side... preposterously, OpenGL was easier to use than DirectX, it at least just fucking worked.

o There is a wrapped called CDX which is utterly worthless. Here's why:

1) No tutorials, and the tutorials that are out there don't work. I mean, just trying to get something into a Windowed screen is problematic.

2) This community uses Yahoo Groups! Yay! Now if I want to search for something I have to use Yahoo Groups' shitty search feature, where it's apparently desireable to click on "Next" 40 fucking times. What a way to make your programming community marginalized... you can't fucking find anything.

3) No documentation whatsoever. If it's out there I haven't found it. Nothing came with the install package (!!!)

So I don't know. I'm not going to give up, but Christ... no idea how you learn for the first time any of this stuff.