Games That Rely On Keypad : How?

[Tramboi]

Hi guys,

I'm still waiting for my Pandora like many of you, but when it will come home, I intend to do a Goldbox O.D. by playing them all.
This and Ultima VI. And many more old games!

But some of these games rely heavily on the numeric keypad e.g. Goldbox games.
What approach do you think of to emulate these?
Are the DPAD diagonals good enough to do precision work like attacking an enemy on NE witout attacking one on E?
If not, should a virtual keypad be implemented in computer emulators in an overlay? Or clever game-specific remapping of the existing keys?

I want to hear your thoughts!

Cheers,
Tramb

 

[Tramboi]

One thing I just thought about, for this kind of games, would be a two-phase keypad.
Let me explain:
You keep the DPAD pushed in a direction, e.g. NW.
Nothing happens.
The event is only sent when you press another button with the other hand.
Seems to me this would be perfect for all these games that don't need joystick but a keypad.

What do you think?

 

[john4p]

Another suggestion:

dpad up/down/left/right = num 8/2/4/6
Q = num 1
W = num 3
1 = num 7
2 = num 9

 

[Caine]

Are the DPAD diagonals good enough to do precision work like attacking an enemy on NE witout attacking one on E?

Almost all feedback I read about the DPAD was about how awesome it was. So I think it is safe to assume this is a yes.

The best way to solve this is to have custom key mappings per application.

I did have a Num Lock key in some of my keyboard layout designs which should swap d-pad between the regular left/up/right/down and the keypad version (same for home, end, pgup, pgdn, the number keys and left ctrl/shift/alt and right ctrl/shift/alt). But such a solution becomes infeasible whenever combinations of such keys are required.

Furthermore, I'm not sure this behaviour can be easily expressed in xmodmap. I do plan to take a look at this once I get my Pandora since I strongly disagree with some choices in the keyboard layout.

 

[Tempel]

Almost all feedback I read about the DPAD was about how awesome it was. So I think it is safe to assume this is a yes.

Not necessarily. The issue is that the dpad has four switches, but uses those four switches to represent eight directions. It might be the best dpad in the world, but if you go for a diagonal, it seems likely that you're going to hit one of the directions slightly before the other. The game then sees, for example, first 'up', then 'right', but by the time it sees 'right', it's already acting on 'up'.

But there are a multitude of other approaches. As Tramb suggested, just have one button act as confirmation, so you hold your desired direction, then tell it to go (I've heard of a couple XBLA games that do this). Or perhaps use the keyboard buttons. Or just use one of the analogue nubs.

 

[Tramboi]

Now what would be the good layer to implement diagonals with confirmation for keypad?
In each emulator?
In a Pandora libSDL extension?