Notices

Okay, forgive my foolish newbiness, but I'm curious about something here.

I decided to change the shift key on my left sided keyboard to caps lock.

Now the keyboard is working all peachy even though letters aren't capitalized like they should be.

This has got my little pea size nut for a brain asking, "Why is this?"

I did a little test and made a blank mapper.txt with nothing in it and used that in Dosbox.

Know what happened? None of the keys worked and then it finally crashed all squibby like. Joy!

So why did that get me all punchy?

Well, if you look at the mapper.txt file all that's accounted for is
key_a "key 97" through key_z "122"

I'm not seeing anything like key_A or key_Z (capital letters) in the mapper.txt file.

Could it be this easy? I know I'm easy. But hey, I never got a disease I didn't earn!

So if Dosbox crashes when you press a key that isn't defined, could this explain the behavior because capital letters aren't defined in the mapper.txt file?

If this turns out that I'm on to something here, you are all my witnesses!

I hope you caught something good Mr. Addison and you share it with us.

But even under Basilisk II and SciTE the xkbd is funky and crashes under OS 2008, and they don't use the mapper.txt like DOSBox does.

I'm witnessing! I'm witnessing! And I'm on my knees praying I'll be singing some hallelujah choruses real soon!

Okay boys, listen up!

I think I've found a dirty, filthy, slutty like a squealing pig solution with the virtual keyboard in Dosbox!

Hey OSEmuTech... front and center! I'm going to need your help on this theory!

Here's the idea in a nutshell. Note, this is only going to be good for Dosbox, nothing else.

Xkbd doesn't like certain keys and causes random crashes.

So what's the solution then? We don't use those keys. See how easy that was?

Now the trick for this to all come together is finding out every possible key that Xkbd is willing to accept consistently and not using the ones it doesn't like such as the keys "a" through "z".

Here's an example taken from the mapper.txt file:
key_1 "key 49"
key_a "key 97"

I know that the number keys always work so here's the switch-a-roo solution:
key_1
Key_a "key 49"

So what does this mean?

Every time I hit "1" on the Xkbd keyboard, the letter "a" will show up on the screen, each and every time! No crashes!

The only thing left that needs to be done, is to change the "1" graphic on the keyboard to an "a".

To put this all together, the button on the Xkbd keyboard will show an "a", when touching that button it will generate a signal stating that the number "1" was pressed, by manipulating the mapper.txt file, it will think that "1" represents the letter "a".

Anyone getting it? And no, Pushwall, I'm not talking about your sex life.

The main struggle to this, is finding every possible key that Xkbd is willing to accept, being function keys, symbols, what have you. Obviously the number keys are important so we shouldn't use those, I only mentioned them as an example.

Once that is all compiled together, given there are enough keys to go around, mapping these out to the alphabet should only take a matter of an hour or so.

So step one: How do we find out which keys does Xkbd not get fussy over?

From there, a temporary solution should shortly come.

Can I get a witness?

OSEmuTech hides behind Pushwall and uses ventriloquism "Hey, can I help?" knocking Pushwall's arm up.

Ah, it's the Jack Daniel's talking. We need more forum smilies.

Ok let's keep my sex life and and squealing pigs out of this!

All I can say is.....Brother Addison this is HUGE and you've got your witness! Your message is clear, the light is shining down and the choruses are singing!! Wow truly amazing!!!

Hey watch it!

Hey OSEmuTech, if you keep drinking like that, you're going to end up like me and forgetting the little details in life......... like February.

I can't program and I don't know how to even look at a source code.

I need your help on this buddy.

If you can compile a list of all of the keys Xkbd is capable of generating, I should be able to make a new, nifty keyboard that doesn't crash the crapping turd out of Dosbox.

Help me, help you, to help me to help others who can help me helping those that help those that helped me helping you that helped me.

Wake up from your drunken stupor damn you!

OSEmutech, I know you want to come to the dark side and enjoy the extra 18 heptendecillion megahertz power that's generated with the 2008 Operating System.

Let's try to work the problem together, or do I need to release the Kraken on you?

I started reading a (few) book(s) on C (C++, GTK+, Maemo) programming lately thanks to FBReader and Evince making it so comfortable to do so while laying in bed. Give me a few years of studying when I'm not at work (full time) and maybe I can contribute something to Maemo development besides quick and dirty ./configure makes.

I did "upgrade" to OS 2008 on Monday. I'm really missing SciTE now as it's a nifty text editor & IDE, and of course I miss xkbd for using in DOSBox (and Basilisk II). If only I could dance around source code and make the changes necessary to fix xkbd (xlibs, libxpm4, libxau0) and SciTE (Scintilla).

Right now I need my iGo to use DOSBox on OS 2008.

Ah ... Kraken, Leviathan, Behemoth, Typhoeus, Juggernaut, Basilisk ... are the brothers of OSEmuTech.

It's fixed. Check out the post I made over in the Applications board.

Here was the simple secret to it all:

Old layout:
default a
default_ks a
shift A
shift_ks A
obey_capslock yes

New layout:
default a
default_ks A
shift A
shift_ks A
obey_capslock yes

For some reason, Xkbd hates lower case letters being used as input.

Also the normal shift key won't work using this method, only the Caps Lock button will do the Upper and Lower cases, so you probably could remove that shift key from your personal, keyboard layout.

Witness?