Safe Key Presses

[Visitor Q]

It seems like every time I think I have it all figured out, there is another bend in the road.

Is there a general rule of thumb for safe keys to use when configuring a control panel?

I though I had it all covered but I have since run into two issues with the following emus.

SSF (Saturn Emulator) - Problem - Num Lock Keys can not be used for control commands.

Visual Pinball - Problem - Key Press 4 cannot be reconfigured from coin insert

So my lesson so far is this, don't use num lock keys or number keys.

It would assume that function keys would be a bad choice as well as well as common used letters like â??pâ? for pause.

Is there a general rule of thumb here? What works and what doesnâ??t? It would be cool to start some sorta data base for something like thisâ?¦

[bkenobi]

Isn't emulation great! Yeah, number keys, function keys, and special keys (tab, shift, control, alt, enter, backspace, etc) would be good to avoid if possible. Most emulators will let you remap keys either with a gui or in an ini file. There are some that are hard coded and cannot be changed at all (I think one of the DC emus is like that for example).

You are running a keyboard emulator (ipac, keywiz) as I recall, correct? If so, you can always have a universal mapping that works for basically everything and then run a script to remap the problem children. For instance, you have everything set up to use 5 and 6 as coin buttons I presume. Then along comes visual pinball where 4 is coin. You could just have a AHK script that launches on start for that one emulator that remaps 5 to 4. The script is simply:

5::4

You can make it more complicated by having it wait for the emulator to close and then automatically stop, or you can kill the task in launch after:

taskkill ButtonRemap

assuming your script was compiled to ButtonRemap.

Anyway, there are endless possibilities of how to get around this, but the easiest thing is to just map everything to things other than those I listed above.

[Visitor Q]

Thank you for your reply.

Right now I am still using my X-Arcade but soon when I get my cab. I will be using an Ipac 4. It is not really an issue but when I reconfigure for my new setup I am trying to avoid these issues and the ones above that I have currently ran into. It's good to know that there are work arounds if something like this would come up. Until this point I have not had any problems with num keys until SSF not supporting them. Not sure if I should stick to them with my new setup or not? I mean I really, really have a lot of emulators sat up at this point and so far these are the only two issues I have ran into and if these can be fixed in the future with an easy work around, I may just stick to the num keys, then use a-z skipping p.

[bkenobi]

Yeah, there's really no standard for what keys emulators default to or even allow you to use. The only thing that comes close is that some use MAME default keys. To be fair though, it's possible that the other emulators used those keys first and MAME copied them. Either way, I agree that a single config would be easiest and just remap the emulators to use whatever the X-Arcade uses.

My choice would be to decide on a setup for yourself and then remap to those keys within the emu or use AHK to remap if the emu isn't flexible. The only problem you could run across is if there are any emus other than MAME that use a RAW input scheme. Although I'm not aware of any, if you do come across such an emulator, you will have to use a different technique. AHK won't remap raw inputs, just higher level stuff. If it can't remap and requires RAW input, you will have to reprogram your X-Arcade (I think). That shouldn't be a problem though...