I've been trying to write a SNES pad driver in Visual Basic. As you are probably aware, Visual Basic is slow. Yes, my driver program works, but if there is anything using any remote amount of processing power (like, I don't know, the game I'm trying to use it in?) the thing slows down to the point where control is impossible.

Now, my program wouldn't be too bad if it just had to watch the parallel port (where my hotwired SNES pad is) for input - But you have to manually poll the stupid thing several times a second (a real SNES does 60, one poll for each frame drawn on the screen). This is great, except my polling gets slowed down considerably by whatever other programs are running.

Winding around to my question: I'm thinking about rewriting my program in C++. This will be the first useful program I've ever written in C. Thus, can this be done in C? Will I have to do something fancy with threads and whatnot to get the polling speed I need? I'm not going to go for the full 60 hz. polling. Maybe 30 would be nice. Does anyone have any comments? Suggestions? Polite notifications that this idea is impossible and cannot be done, C or no C?

~Zero the Inestimable