Changing the current layout is desirable mainly for these three reasons:
- Unlike dedicated game consoles, the Pyra has a keyboard which already has buttons labeled with A, B, X and Y (and C, Z, I). Although the confusion this causes can somewhat be avoided by using graphical images like guihints or by using language conventions like "A button" and "A key", it is still not considered to be good practice to have two different buttons with the same label.
Are you serious about that?
I am currently trying to imagine someone hitting the X key on the keyboard part of the Pandora over and over again in desperation when a game he loaded says "Press the X button to jump", without ever thinking about it could mean the button X...
Seriously, I do not consider that as any issue. Anyone who will not find out that X when playing a game is most probably the button and not the keyboard should be kept away from any electronical devices as far as possible.
I've heard a lot of different issues and things (especially at the weeks I've been at the GamesCom), but the first thing gamers do is press the buttons instead of the keyboard.
- The Pandora layout is different from all other major consoles which can be emulated on it. It is unavoidable to be different from many of them, but it is not necessary to be different from all of them. When playing emulated games, you have to mentally map physical buttons to emulated buttons. This is harder if the source and target set of symbols are the same. E.g. to play SNES games on the Pandora you have to remember that A is B, B is X, Y is A, X is Y. By using a different symbol set, you still have to learn a mapping, but at least there is less potential confusion.
Yes, the Pandora layout is different from all other major consoles.
And to add more confusion, you want to make the Pyra layout different from the Pandora layout as well.
Does not compute.
I've been playing a lot of SNES games, even before I had the Pandora.
I've never actually remembered what button was where, as most of the games didn't need remembering the buttons, you just got used to the control and played.
There aren't that many games showing some button sequences which you need to press in the correct order.
For existing Pandora programs and games, it is true that changing the labels takes some effort. On the other hand, it would be a good opportunity to standardize guihint button icons (cf.
http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15778-pandorapyra-applications-usrsharepandyra/) and encourage Pandora/Pyra devs to modify their interfaces and help screens to use those standard guihints. This would help a lot to create a nice uniform look and feel.
We've gone from GP32 to GP2X to WIZ to Pandora.
Based on my experience I can tell that a minority of developers will recompile their old games and fix stuff like that.
And especially games that are being released on both the Pandora and the Pyra would need two different labels for buttons.
That doesn't make much sense, it just adds more work for developers.
I've never seen a company change their button layout from one device to the next one (well, except for if the controller has changed significantly like the Wii)
Well, Latin fit these more than Greek does and at least most of these emulated systems have Latin too.
We do want a layout that makes sense.
Yes. And the reason any other Latin letter layout makes more sense than the one we have in the Pandora already is...?
Then again, im not against blank keys.
As someone said, that would be confusing unless we do that face swapping idea.
I can imagine the homebrew games...
"Press a blank button to jump and a blank button to shoot. Another blank button opens the menu"...
No, he means latin. He's talking about still using ABXY but changing the positions: that would require changing existing apps, and anyone that wanted to do a simultaneous Pandora/Pyra release would need to change their documentation at least.
Oh. I thought he was talking about the difficulty for devs to change them to Greek. At least changing the positions would keepthe same letters.
And cause a mess for any existing Pandora game.
The SNES has the same letters as the Pandora as well, just in a different layout.
snes9x4d4p keeps the correct letters in default setup. Even playing games like Super Mario World becomes a challenge - because running and jumping is nigh impossible.
What I think
would be a good fit - given all the above considerations - would be to use multi-character labels with Latin letters. A collection of short words or syllables for example:
- Fee Fie Foe Fum
- Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti
Umm... nope, sorry, that's just too much.
We clearly should have one letter / number per button, nothing else.
Everything else doesn't really make sense to me, but maybe someone can explain to me why exactly we need to change our current layout...?
It doesn't help with emulators, but it makes things a lot more confusing for existing Pandora programs and homebrew.
The reason *I* dislike the current layout is it gives no clue as to what should be the prime button. Some games use A, especially those that were coded without reference to a real Pandora, and assumed A would be a sensible button to use. Many games then used B, perhaps after the Nintendo layout, or perhaps because our version of uboot uses it as 'select'. Lately, the X button seems to be a popular choice, following the Sega/MS/western PSX standard. If the A button had been in a sensible location within easy reach every game would use that (apart from the odd PC port using Enter) and it wouldn't be guesswork every time you start a new game.
And changing the layout would change that?
Nope, it wouldn't.
It's not consistent on ANY console. Neither PSX nor SNES nor MegaDrive nor XBox.
The button used to confirm, cancel, open menu, etc. changes with every game you play.
I'm mostly playing role playing games, and playing two at the same time is quite a challenge, as they often swap cancel and okay or the menu button.
A new layout or any symbols will not change anything about that.
Well, since you were asking for my realistic opinion here:
While you're here, can we also get your reason for putting the 2 extra buttons where _wb_ has been posting?
It's the only possible way to add two buttons so that they don't get in your way.
I don't want to make the buttons smaller and more cramped together.
We can't go further to the edge (physical issues).
Putting a button below the current B button will lead to accidental presses when you want to press A, Y or both together.
That won't happen if the button is below and above A.
BTW: So far, we had 3 polls about the button layout.
In each poll, keeping the current Pandora layout won with a high advantage against any other idea here.
It seems most of the users are with me to keep the current layout... or did I miss some poll where they all voted that the current layout is bad?
