:hello: Happy to report I finally finished my clinicals and graduated! Glad that's over. Anyway, I'll be aiming to update
timmyb's excel file / key catalog again periodically:
http://goo.gl/W7hZ5H
I can confirm that the dropbox link on
DjVj's original post is broken again.
Agreed. I wish someone would pick this project back up.
I spread myself way too thin a couple months ago, but I would love to help if someone would take the lead and explain where this is and what is still needed.
Last I heard, we hadn't really made any progress hah. We are trying to catalog all keys that specific emu's don't like --- all the "landmines" that could crash or grief any given emulator if the emulator tried to handle it (for example: character "a" might be handled fine by Snes9x, but the emu can't accept "Left Alt", crashes if trying to handle some other character, or exits if multiple certain keys are pressed at the same time --- you could imagine something like player 1 pressing "ALT" and player 2 pressing "F4" at the same time on accident while playing a game, thus triggering "ALT+F4" to immediately close the emulator).
I believe the end-goal of making a catalog of these "landmines" would be to then create a universal key scheme that avoids those landmines. We could implement that universal scheme in xpadder etc.
So what is currently needed is a bunch of forum users choosing one emulator to test, configuring that emu to take a keyboard key as input, pressing that key to make sure the emulator takes the input without strange behavior, writing that key as "good", "bad", or "see comments" in timmyb's excel file, then repeating that process for every key on the keyboard. It's a lot of work.
Personally I think if we really want to do this we should trim the list of emulators. With the advancements in RetroArch it can drastically reduce the number of emulators one would need to setup. So if we are going to do this my vote would be to come up with a short list of emus we would target.
I think that's a good practical starting goal. I've update the excel so that the emu's covered by retroarch are highlighted in green text. That way we only need to test retroarch for "landmines" to knock out 20% of our workload.
I thought the original intent was to produce and provide keymap and joymap (for lack of a better word) files that a user can drop into their setup. You can then use your controller and not have to remap all the emulators one at a time. And it was to encompass all emulators, not just one.
Yes, that is the end-goal (holy grail) of the project. Once we have a universal map of good keys, we can start making Xpadder profiles for hundreds of different hardware devices. Once that Xpadder device library is built, a user could plug a any controller they bought at Goodwill or got from their house into their friend's computer and be instantly configured to play any emu. --- But we must find the "landmines" that crash the emu's first.
DjVj, let me know if any of my understanding about this project is off-base. I'd be happy to learn more and edit this post if needed to not confuse others.
You can get a program called autohotkey and do this.
... #IfWinActive, ahk_exe ccs64.exe; So when this is running pressing the following buttons remaps that button.
7::!F4 ... So how this works is that it goes through the list until it matches an IF statement and then exits. ... You would still need to do an excel spreadsheet to work out what keys are needed to be remapped for each system.
I truncated the quote above. I think xpadder would do something similar. I may not be understanding your code correctly though. But nevertheless, like you said, I believe the issue is finding that set of good keys that will work with every emulator first.
