Originally Posted by Just Desserts
Sounds like something that should be implemented or enabled on a per-driver basis, then. Otherwise it seems like exactly the sort of half-baked, user-hostile, anti-feature that MAME is infamous for. It violates the hell out of the rule of least surprise.

On the contrary, it's exactly the sort of user-friendliness you advocate: it changes the keyboard emulation from matching the layout of the original at the expense of what's actually marked on your PC keyboard to (attempting to) make it so e.g. shift-2 on a US keyboard is always @, even on machines where shift-2 is " or a UK pound sign or whatever. I would argue that having keys on your PC keyboard *not* generate the same thing on the emulated system is actually the major violation of least-surprise here. In particular, pretty much all other computer emulators *only* have an equivalent of natural keyboard mode.