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felipesanches / mame

MAME - Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
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[anotherworld] keyboard input (alphabet letters) #8

Closed felipesanches closed 7 years ago

felipesanches commented 7 years ago

There is a sketch of input handling code at src/mame/drivers/anotherworld.cpp to deal with keyboard keys from A to Z, which would store those keystrokes in a VM variable called VM_VARIABLE_LAST_KEYCHAR. The purpose of those keys would be to enter level-code passwords.

I'm not sure all VM implementations supported that. I know that the bytecode of the MSDOS release allows one to select letters with the directional arrows and action button. Maybe the original Amiga release VM accept A-Z keystrokes as well. And maybe the MSDOS one also support that? I'll have to check that.

Anyway, I also have to consider how that would map to a real hardware implementation of the game. (I'm also wondering how could that be deal with it in an arcade cabinet setup, since I think we wouldn't want to have a cumbersome keyboard attached to it)

felipesanches commented 7 years ago

With the commit above (https://github.com/felipesanches/mame/commit/b74e622d628dfeedd303a51a7f2bcff88df25098) the level-code screen loads and can be operated with the directional and action keys. The letter keys only work for the first line of letters, but not for the second one, tough.

felipesanches commented 7 years ago

It is also worth to notice that the Amiga bytecode offers the user this set of letters:

A B C D E F OK
G H I J K L DEL

While the MSDOS bytecode display these:

B C D F G H OK
J K L R T X DEL

And apparently the Amiga bytecode does not react to the keyboard inputs, while MSDOS one does.