Notices

Thanks. As suggested by Arnim in this thread, I have used that for over a month, but the mouse is still screwy and sticky.

Maybe you also need:

frameskip=0
priority=highest,normal

Those are the only other things that I changed in dosbox.conf other than the [autoexec] section to mount my dos folder and start a Master of Orion v1.3 game.

Okay, just a small little tweak to the two keyboards.

This should be the final design unless people start throwing rocks at me, demanding immediate changes.

Here's the abbreviations for the keys and what they mean:
Ins - Insert
Home - Home
Up - Page Up
Del - Delete
End - End
Down - Page Down
Prt - Print Screen
Lock - Scroll Lock
Pau - Pause
Sys - Sys Rq
Brk - Break

Also, the four bullet buttons next to the equals sign are the arrow keys.

If someone knows the ASCII character graphics for the arrow keys, could you please post a response?

Finally, it would be nice to have different font sizes throughout the keyboard.

Can you only declare one global font to be used for the entire keyboard or is it possible to do them each individually?


Anyway, here's the keyboard for right handed people:



Here's the two files for it:
right.zip
right2.zip

Edit your usr/bin/dosboxkbd to
#!/bin/sh
xkbd -geometry +65536+65536 -k /media/mmc2/right2.xkbd & xkbd -geometry +722+65536 -k /media/mmc2/right.xkbd


And here's the keyboard for all of you ignorant left handed folks:



Here's the two files for it:
left.zip
left2.zip

Edit your usr/bin/dosboxkbd to
#!/bin/sh
xkbd -geometry +65536+65536 -k /media/mmc2/left.xkbd & xkbd -geometry +722+65536 -k /media/mmc2/left2.xkbd


I've got an idea that could greatly cut down the screen clutter, but I won't have time to try it out until the middle of the week if I'm lucky.

I might also want to try having two keys per row since the buttons are so small, not sure how that's going to work out though.

Anyway, there you have it.

If there's any major problems that occur with using these keyboards, such as a nasty, seething little bug that falls from the sky, lands on your Nokia, wiggles, and then pees on it, causing your Tablet to go into tetanus, please post your anger here.

I really wish that worked for me in "DOS" and Windows 3.11. Thank you for trying to assist me.

Addison your 2 keyboards rock! It's cool that most games don't require fullscreen mode and the game screen centers between the 2 keyboards with the tablet bar info at the top. If you can now get that font thing figured out my weak eyes would appreciate it. The only minor problem I have is that some games accept all the keys needed from the keyboard but in some cases they refuse to accept some of them. It must be something to do with XKBD since my bluetooth keyboard does work. Oh well, I can live with it. Keep rockin', Addison. You're the main Dude, dude!!

Hey Push! Thanks for the encouraging words! You actually made me feel like I finally contributed something to these forums.

But yeah, I'm getting the same response on some games as well.

Here's the skinny on why certain games aren't giving you so much as a dim flicker of recognition when using the virtual keyboard.

First, Xkbd doesn't like to be fed lower case letters, if you try to do that, there's a good chance it will snap at you.

So the whole trick around this is by making it think that you're not offering lower case letters to it.

The work around way I did this was to send it Capital Capital letters.

So instead of giving it a lower case letter which would make Xkbd throw up, it's being fed a Shifted Capital letter A. Make any sense?

Most games seem to interpret a Capital letter "A" as an "a". Unfortunately, other games get weirded out by this bizarro concept.

Right now I'm waiting to see what OSEmuTech has in store with his next keyboard. Hopefully he'll have some new, original, and creative ideas, then I'll steal them for my own.

At least now, we've got some stuff that will work okay with this alternative method. But yeah, I'm with you on this, I only remember those games where it doesn't work.

I totally was hoping that Omni Sports Basketball would be supported with Xkbd, I also wanted to make a touch screen steering wheel for Ivan Stewart's Super Off road. But that ain't happening any time soon it seems like. At least I'm not bitter.......

Oh well, until this whole mess gets fixed, hopefully there's enough here to work with to make the wait more tolerable until that day comes.

ArnimS: 1994 game, requires 386-486 - won't run playably in dosbox. Sorry.

Another craptastic keyboard design by your drunken abusive fellow poster.

This one isn't quite so excessive in taking up screen space.

Once I figure out how to insert images into the darn little bugger, I'll give that a try as well.

The second keyboard comes up when you press the yellow star bullet thingie dohicker character.

It does have a minimize feature, but I don't think it's all too friendly with Dosbox.

Works great for everything else though.

Only known issue is that the left and right bracket characters, "[" and "]", are a little funky.

They sit right below the Ctrl and Atl keys. So when you press them, you get the character, but then it also sends the command that your pressed either the Ctrl or Atl keys right afterwards.

Just press the bullet mod key and then either the Ctrl or Alt key that is still lit to return back to normal.

Sorry about that, but it's not like most people are using the bracket keys for anything anyway.

Here's the screenies to get punchy over:






There's one for the left and one for the right side, whatever your preference is.


Left one:
leftfull.zip
Edit usr/bin/dosboxkbd
xkbd -geometry +65536+65536 -k /media/mmc2/leftfull.xkbd

Right one:
Edit usr/bin/dosboxkbd
rightfull.zip
xkbd -geometry +722+65536 -k /media/mmc2/rightfull.xkbd



I still have one last, final idea in mind. I think it will work out quite nicely if I don't attempt doing it while hazing in and out of consciousness during a typical night of drunken stuporedness.

Meaning, don't expect a release anytime soon.

Addison - but but but how will I type Apple ][ ?????

Nice!

Nate

Oh my, very very nice indeed, Addison. I can now see clearly what those keys are that I'm tapping on. Great stuff!!!