Proposal: Buttons combination in games/emulators/whatever

[Xcl4m4t10n]

Hello boards,

First of all, I have to notice you that I haven't had any "obscure handheld" from long time ago: My last one was a Wiz, so maybe what I am going to say is senseless.

Back on the GP2X and Wiz days, one of the biggest complains about emulators and games was the button combination for some actions (save game, exit emulator, etc.). We had a lot of software and somehow each of this programs used different combination for the same actions. This is a mess.

How Pandora dealed with this? I think it's a good Idea to make a list with common combination and try to encourage the devs to use those "community approved" button combinations in order to have the same combination for almost all the software.

What do you think about this?

 

[WizardStan]

Such a thing has been proposed several times over the years with the Pandora, and it never goes anywhere. You can't come up with a standard that'll fit every need, every developer is going to do what they deem best, and there's so many keys on the keyboard anyway that every competing option will make sense for some one reason or another.

 

[Grench]

And... you cannot force a standard convention on a community of volunteer anarchist hackers. They're all going to do whatever they want anyway, which is part of the Pyra design spec.

 

[kuru]

Where we are going, we don't need button combinations.

How can you not love keyboards?!

pcsx has sth like
1 = save state
2 = load state
3 = prev state
4 = next state

 

[FIQ]

Most emulators (keyword: most) follow some kind of similarities. Sometimes. Maybe.
Fast-forward is either backspace, 0 or F or maybe in the menu.

Yeah, it is kind of a mess IMO, but I never saw it as a significant problem -- just means a slightly larger learning curve. A standard would be nice, but I don't think people would adhere to it anyway. And debian-native applications certainly wouldn't.

 

[Neelix]

Plus what works well in one emulator would not work well in others. Assigning keyboard keys to special functions works well for emulated devices without a keyboard, but there are a number of emulated devices that do have keyboards, so for those the keyboard keys need to work as keyboard keys.

-Neelix