Solved Confused Over Dos Games

[voljega]

@redm said in Confused Over Dos Games:

Sure it doesn't help that dosbox doesn't really seem to have an active development (latest version is pretty old I think) and apparently not really open to integrate even obvious patches, like for the various joystick problems

Although quite a long time in the making, the latest version was juste released ?

And they are clearly open to external help, but you have to learn the specific of recalbox distribution (mostly buildroot and configgen), but I don't think the team has much time to look at them at the moment with the latest release and the heay support period it requires, it should be more easy for them in a few months

[Dragu]

@voljega
There is always a possibility to help yourself in the dead-zone problematic. It depend alot of the speed, higher the movement speed, higher the deadzone. But you can combine, as example mouse mapping for left/right/backward and direction key for forward, as an example. With the possibility to put forward mouse on a button for lower forward speed. And as you can remap multiple keys on a single emulation switch, further possibilities. All this vary with the games.

[voljega]

@dragu said in Confused Over Dos Games:

But you can combine, as example mouse mapping for left/right/backward and direction key for forward, as an example.

I'm mostly interested in mouse mapping for adventure games or strategy games

[Dragu]

@redm said in Confused Over Dos Games:

why does that fricking keyboard layout not work properly inside dosbox? (I couldn't make it do proper german layout. Even manually setting it to gr makes it kinda german, but some keys are dead, some have a different mapping, some characters are missing... It's been a while, but I'm sure under the real DOS we did have german umlauts...)

There is a solution, because I also have a bluetooth german keyboard.
Very simple, you must just put in dosbox.cfg keyboardlayout=de129
that means gr.
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=21824

[redm]

@voljega said in Confused Over Dos Games:

Although quite a long time in the making, the latest version was juste released ?

What do you mean? I only see 0.74 from 2010...

And they are clearly open to external help,

Maybe. I don't have first hand experience with them, this was just my impression from reading threads to the various joystick problems. And apparently those proposed, pretty obvious if you ask me, patches aren't yet in. IIRC I read in the release notes of latest recalbox that they applied some joystick button patch, and e.g. the one I linked in the other thread is 5 years old and the problem still not solved... just my impression.

[voljega]

What do you mean? I only see 0.74 from 2010...

Oh sorry you were speaking about DosBox, I would you were speaking about Recalbox

Maybe. I don't have first hand experience with them, this was just my impression from reading threads to the various joystick problems. And apparently those proposed, pretty obvious if you ask me, patches aren't yet in. IIRC I read in the release notes of latest recalbox that they applied some joystick button patch, and e.g. the one I linked in the other thread is 5
years old and the problem still not solved... just my impression.

So not getting if you're speaking about Recalbox or Dosbox now

But yeah Dosbox development seems to be dead or stalled

For Recalbox, as stated I don't think the team have the time right now, unless you take the time yourself to learn everything about the distribution and commit some working code in the desired format and everything

[redm]

Yes, speaking of dosbox of course!

Citing myself:

Sure it doesn't help that dosbox doesn't really seem to have an active development...

As for Recalbox implementing my wishlist, sure I know how this open source things works. I'm in this for a long time already .. do it or shut up And when we get a first public drop of dosbox support, it's clear that not everything is as good as it could be right from the beginning. But it could still be food for thought. And I have a good feeling about Recalbox, as usability and ease of use seems to be an important focus here. I like that. I value it if things sometimes "just work", even in open source software

[redm]

@dragu No, unfortunately this didn't help either. There is no difference of just specifying gr.

I wonder though, if the problem is actually somewhere outside dosbox. Just noticed that I can't enter umlauts in ES either... Strangely on the command shell (local and SSH) everything is fine... but I guess I should start another thread for this topic, this one starts to get longish and offtopic...

[Dragu]

@redm
I have no idea why you need "Umlaute", perversion of every language. I have in general swiss-keyboard's because I write text mostly in german or french. So I need both perv. But in Recalbox and gaming, what the hell you want to do with this ?
Instead the display in ssh is the display of the characters that you reach with Alt Gr on the "Umlaute"-keys.
The keyboard function correctly with all other letters if the position in recalbox.conf is filled out

# ------------ F - Language and keyboard ------------ #
## Set the language of the system (fr_FR,en_US,en_GB,de_DE,pt_BR,es_ES,it_IT,eu_ES,tr_TR,zh_CN)
system.language=de_DE
## set the keyboard layout (fr,en,de,us,es)
system.kblayout=de
## Set you local time
## Select your timezone from : ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/ (string)
;system.timezone=Europe/Paris

[redm]

@dragu Hmm, I have to check recalbox.conf, but IIRC I have set the the proper keyboard layout there. Just that I have english as system language. The umlauts are just the most obvious example. This effects a couple more keys, like +/*, '/#, -/_, ´/`, </>, ?/ß, or y and z switched, which you need every now and then. And after all keyboard is something that should be configured once and "just work". Not sure, what you mean with the ssh comment, but as I said with SSH everything is perfect.

[Dragu]

@redm said in Confused Over Dos Games:

IIRC

comment -> command, language switching defect.
I think that IRC is not a recalbox issue, that could be from the terminal side.

[redm]

@dragu IIRC -> if I remember correctly I checked, and keyboard layout is set to "de". I also found that input in ES is ok - for the most part. It's mainly lacking just the umlauts plus the <>| key. Interestingly the umlauts produce symbols like {}... Seems partly german, partly english. Weird.
Anyway, so it looks like there is indeed something wrong with dosbox. More so as I found the same problems under Retropie. Keyboard layouts have alwas been a pain in Linux... I think I'll give up for now...

[Dragu]

@redm

I just looked german keyboard and I compared with my swiss keyboard.

{ } under Alt Gr.

So I agree, is german-swizerland more as a pure german keyboard.
I think just the programmer preferred Toblerone to Ritter Sport.