Bracket keys not working

[diogoeichert]

I'm running CocoaMSX on Sierra (10.12.5) and none of the brackets are working, either the normal square brackets nor the curly brackets by holding shift. Tried with different software.

[0xe1f]

Is it that you can't configure the square bracket key to act as a particular MSX key (in Preferences), or that pressing the square bracket on your Mac doesn't register as a square bracket in the emulated machine?

Different systems use different keyboard layouts, and depending on system, the Mac's square bracket key may not map to a square bracket (or curly) on a particular MSX system (e.g. Cyrillic systems).

Please clarify what you're experiencing.

[diogoeichert]

With keyboard settings untainted (I checked that [ is mapped to [) when I hit [ on the keyboard, nothing happens on the emulated MSX. I have just tested every key in the keyboard, and there are other keys which are not working: ;, ' and ~. The host Mac has a standard U.S. keyboard with default settings.

[0xe1f]

Which system are you emulating (should be shown in Preferences)? Can you try pressing "]" with a Sony HB-F1XD running?

[diogoeichert]

I was running the default C-BIOS. With the Sony HB-F1XD [ prints @ and ] prints [ though in the keyboard settings [ is still mapped to [ but at least the keys are responding now. I have tried other systems and they give different results but these keys always seem to be different from what expected.

[0xe1f]

CocoaMSX maps keys by using the placement of the keys as a guideline. In other words, "[" appears to have different functionality on system A vs system B, because each system has a different key in that particular physical location (usually due to regional settings).

Because C-BIOS doesn't include BASIC, mapping of non-alpha keys has not been an issue with C-BIOS. What ROM are you using to determine whether or not [] work?

[diogoeichert]

First I was trying C-BIOS with Hot-Logo (Brazilian Portuguese counterpart of MSX-Logo), then when you suggested the HB-F1XD system I tried it both with Logo and the resident BASIC. Same results were obtained with both Logo and BASIC.

[0xe1f]

This is an issue between C-BIOS and the ROM, not the emulator itself. CocoaMSX is generating the events to produce key up/key down - either C-BIOS (most likely) or HotLogo are ignoring it. Solution is to use another system - C-BIOS was mostly intended to play ROMs anyway.

[diogoeichert]

Well, it's definitely not related to Hot-Logo, since the issue happens in BASIC, too. But I do have some good news, I've tested a few more systems and I have found at least two that just work out of the box with the standard U.S. keyboard of the Mac: the Philips VG-8000 and the Gradiente Expert XP-800. The latter even works with Hot-Logo, which apparently requires some Portuguese support for even booting.

Perhaps I'm just lucky that these system are probably wired in the same way modern keyboards are. But what if we had an additional abstraction layer in the emulator input subsystem in order to correctly map the keys for every MSX system? I've noticed that some keys are tricky even between the English language systems.

[0xe1f]

CocoaMSX actual does perform some mapping - specifically to display keyboard layout info and perform pasting. However, from what I can tell, the issue here is that the keys are ignored by the ROM - either because of the ROM itself or C-BIOS. Neither of those things are something that falls within the emulator's purview to fix.

[diogoeichert]

I see. OK then, try to ignore C-BIOS and the ROM for this: even if I run the Sony HB-F1XD with no ROM inserted and vanilla settings those keys don't work out of the box. Do you think there could be some additional layer here? Maybe some collection of per-system key maps?

[0xe1f]

With HB-F1XD, "~" (Mac) maps to "]" (MSX) and "]" (Mac) maps to "[" (MSX). If that doesn't work out, you can always reconfigure/remap via Preferences.

Given the number of systems available, and the fact that MSX/modern keyboard layouts don't really align, doing per-system mapping would be too much of a chore.

[diogoeichert]

Well, that's strange, because the key map under Preferences says [ is mapped to [ but when I type [ it shows a @. Maybe I'm missing something here?

I know maintaining per-system key maps is a huge chore and I don't think that should be a one-person task. But maybe if some kind of key map files were supported by the emulator, the community could gradually work on these map files.

I see the systems under Machines already contain a config.ini file each. Maybe a new section, say [Keymap] could be enough to do the trick?

Those automatically downloaded system .zip file are pretty neat, by the way. Are they already maintained by the community somehow?

[0xe1f]

Those automatically downloaded system .zip file are pretty neat, by the way. Are they already maintained by the community somehow?

Yes, @mars2000you maintains the machine list - it's the same set as blueMSX (on which CocoaMSX is based)

[0xe1f]

Reopening, since the C-BIOS team has fixed the issue.