Home Page Forums MAME MAME Suppressing keyboard input

I saw it mentioned that you can’t play The Immortal because it doesn’t like seeing keystrokes. What if you go to the Keyboard Selection menu and disable the keyboard until it’s ready to accept keyboard input?

Yep, it works. You can do it entirely through the internal UI, but if you’re starting from the command line:

• mame apple2gs -ui_active -noskip_gameinfo -flop3 apple2gs_flop_orig:immortal:flop1
• Hit Tab at the system info screen to bring up the menu
• Choose “Input Settings”, then “Keyboard Selection”, move down to “[root:]” and flip it to “Disabled”
• Hit Tab to dismiss the menu
• Wait for it to prompt you to insert the Graphics disk
• Hit Tab to bring up the menu, switch disks the usual way with the file manager
• Navigate back to the Keyboard Selection menu and flip “[root:]” back to “Enabled”
• Hit Tab to dismiss the menu – it will leak through to the machine and the game will continue loading
• After it loads the graphics, it will prompt you to switch back to the Play disk again
• At this point it doesn’t get upset at unexpected keystrokes – you can work it out

Obligatory image:

Wouldn't the better fix be to simply not leak any keys while the UI is active? This confused me in the past too, and it often made installations where you had to switch disks very fragile for the same reason

Darkstar, we're awaiting your PR with bated breath.

I was under the impression that this was considered a feature and not a bug, and was implemented for a particular reason...

As far as I'm aware, it's always been considered a bug.

Another thing you could do is to map the UI Config Menu key to NUMLOCK and clear the NUMLOCK mapping to KEYPAD_ESC in Input(this machine).

Or even perhaps a joystick button.

Just so long as hitting the key you've defined, doesn't generate any key events to the IIGS like TAB would.