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My latest toy
Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:16 am
by richmond62
I picked up my latest toy in a charity shop in England about a month ago (£8 to the Somerset Hospice):
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and it is lovely.
Those 2 red "wedge" things are SPACE bars.
BUT there is something on it called a 'MODE' key, which, on being pressed converts the W,A,S, and D keys into arrow keys, and on being pressed again, sets them back again.
My 'moan' is that with LC/OXT Lite on MacOS I can detect no rawKey signal from the MODE key:
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Nor for that matter from 2 of the 3 left-hand buttons:
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Although in the great scheme of things this is not really important, it might be useful for a stack to "know" when these keys have been pressed.
Re: My latest toy
Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:26 am
by richmond62
Oddly enough, my DELUX thing has icons on those buttons:
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Re: My latest toy
Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:30 am
by richmond62
Needless to say, the SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT keys send NO rawKey codes on MacOS (will jack it up to a Linux box in due course.
This is a real "Pakistan International Airways" in certain respects as with xTalk (at least) one seems unable to trap any modifier keys on MacOS.
Re: My latest toy
Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:35 am
by richmond62
The 'funny' thing is that this gaming keyboard knocks the socks off this thing:
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which is being pushed as a superior thing, even though it has a significantly reduced range of keys.
I do NOT use these keypads for gaming (I do not enjoy computer gaming), but for repetitive programming tasks, having had, in 1999, significant nerve damage to wrists and finger tips as a result of programming using Toolbook.
However, any game developed with OXT (not as daft as it sounds) has to take into account than an end-user may have a gamepad connected to their computer and expect to be able use it.
Re: My latest toy
Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:32 pm
by OpenXTalkPaul
richmond62 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 09, 2024 9:16 am
My 'moan' is that with LC/OXT Lite on MacOS I can detect no rawKey signal from the MODE key:
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MODE.png
Nor for that matter from 2 of the 3 left-hand buttons:
I'm not familiar with this device, but my first thought is 'mode' might be an actual mode on chip in the controller, switching on/off something internal in the device, like 'Turbo Mode' (auto 'rapid fire') button found on some 3rd party game controllers have, that don't send their own signal but instead have an effect on the signal of other buttons / joysticks.
As I've brought up before, if the thing is an HID device then you should be able to use the HIDAPI Extension to capture any signals the device does send as raw bytes. That is a bit different than the way the Engine's 'rawKey' things work, which uses key-codes that are based on Unix Xlib's codes. Most alpha-numeric keypads, mice, trackballs, and trackpads are HID devices these days, since that became a widely used standard 20+ years ago.
Re: My latest toy
Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2024 7:54 am
by richmond62
Parenthetically; this is the lot who sold me my 'toy', and who do a fantastic job:
https://www.st-margarets-hospice.org.uk/home-page
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Re: My latest toy
Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2024 3:38 pm
by OpenXTalkPaul
Nothing wrong with that, I've gotten gear from "Good Will" (2nd hand charity stores across the US), love to peruse people's old electronics (and collectables) at 'flea market's' and I've been known to stop at yard/garage sales, or even someone's trash when I see something shiny. That's how I wound up with a genuine Nintendo (of USA) arcade cabinet from the 1980s in my basement (it has Intel+Nvidia innards now, but kept the original trackball and wired it to an USB mouse-board).