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Hello. I’m using a wireless keyboard with Magic DosBox on Android, and it runs the game I want to play great for the most part.
However, I’m having one issue with the program. If I press and release the right Shift key on my keyboard without pressing another key while Right Shift is held, the entirety of Dosbox (including the command prompt) will act as though Shift is being held down until I press Left Shift, or press Right Shift and press another key whilst Right Shift is held down.
Is there any way to resolve this issue?
I’m sorry, I should probably elaborate. I’m using a Samsung Galaxy Tab E, and running Android 7.1.1. My wireless keyboard is a Fintie… and I don’t know what the keyboard model is. I don’t see any labels beyond the brand on it.
The left shift key acts normally.
But if I press the Right Shift key and release it without pressing another key beforehand, Magic DosBox acts as though Shift is still being held. Lowercase lettters are typed as capital letters, “/“ is typed as “?”, “,” is typed as “<“, “1” is typed as “!” and so on. The Shift condition does not turn off until I either press Left Shift, or press Right Shift again and press another key before releasing it, upon which the Shift condition turns off.
I checked it, but its weird, I can’t reproduce it. I use K400+ keyboard. What is your keyboard? Maybe I can create simple application for logging pressed keys. Then we can see what is your keyboard sending to device.
It’s the keyboard that came
with this:There doesn’t seem to be a model number on the keyboard itself or anything.
Also, the problem I have doesn’t seem to occur anywhere except Magic Dosbox, which is very strange. Will the logging program use a similar framework, in the hopes of replicating this?
do u have a cap locks key? if not then on some keyboards a shift key acts as caps .the left shift on my sony chatpad is caps.
Hello folks,
Sorry to necro this thread but I’m having the exact same problem with a Planet Computers Gemini, an Android-based PDA with a build-in physical keyboard. The RIGHT SHIFT “latches” in exactly the way the OP described, and the only way to “un-latch” it is to either tap it briefly or to temporarily use the LEFT SHIFT at which point it “un-latches” when you release the LEFT SHIFT.
I’m actually trying to run an old Psion 3a emulator on Magic DOSbox, and the emulator itself has quirks which have required the use of Swiftkey as a sort of interpreter, and various on-screen buttons to emulate the softkeys and custom buttons of the original Psion hardware. As you can imagine, with three apps all talking to each other it took ages to figure out exactly what was happening with certain shifted keys, especially the / key which would either not work at all, or produce the wrong character, or bounce between the two states.
When I figured it out and searched for “magic dosbox” “right shift” , this was only one of two pages that were returned. The other was someone on a Gemini forum having a similar issue using a different flavour of DOSbox, so there may be some commonality in the source.
I’m kinda hoping someone has figured a way around this. If not, maybe this post will attract any other hapless Gemini users who are trying to recreate 20 year old hardware on the latest gear. It won’t necessarily help them, but at lest they’ll know they’re not alone!
In the meantime thank you for demonstrating to me that I’m not the only one to have had this issue. And for Magic DOSbox itself which is an amazingly versatile program. The ability to do on-screen tappable buttons enabled me to recreate the whole panel of softkeys that were present on the original Psion hardware, without which I’d have been stuck using F-keys which would have had to have been remapped because the Gemini doesn’t have an F-key row.
Hi,
I can try attach my usb keyboard and will see what it does.
Like a workaround, could you try bind your physical right shift to “right shift” offered in mapper? You can rebind keys in mapper/voodoo control
Genius! Sometimes all it takes is a fresh brain.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting that to work because of the quirks of these three apps working in conjunction, but it’s certainly cured the “locked shift” problem that was interfering with other investigations.
Part of the larger issue is that as well as CTRL and SHIFT keys the Gemini keyboard also has a FN key for accessing symbols such as |, \ and [ that are “under” some of the keys, and an ALT key that doubles as a shortcut for system functions, some of which can be trapped and others that can’t. All four of these can interact in very odd ways.
Also, depending on the IME used the SHIFT keys can return an individual scancode of their own, or a scancode in conjunction with the key they’re pressed with, or sometimes both in sequence depending on how rollover is handled. It all makes for some interesting trial and error.
For instance, playing around this evening I’ve discovered that while SHIFT-comma (which is / on the Gemini keyboard for legacy reasons) doesn’t register in either Magic DOSbox or the Psion emulator, it does work if you do FN-SHIFT, hold SHIFT, press comma. I have absolutely no idea why.
On the other hand FN-3 (which is \ on the Gemini) works fine in Magic DOSbox but stops working as soon as the Psion emulator is launched from within it, presumably because the emulator is using its own custom keyboard routines that expect to see an IBM-compatible keyboard and not something emulated by an Android IME. Emulators within emulators.
Thanks again for the heads-up on the SHIFT remapping thing. I’d have no doubt tried it eventually out of sheer desperation but it would have taken me a long time to get there.
It wasn’t much help for any of the other issue but it prevented that sticky Shift problem which would only have complicated matters and possibly had me looking for other faults that weren’t there.
In the end a combination of quirky hardware and a stubborn emulator had me reaching for the hex editor so I could patch one of the emulators libraries that contained a built-in table of keyboard codes (something mentioned in the Psion FAQ going back to the 1990s, so not a new problem).
The good news is that emulation is now working really well, with 98% of the keys working as expected and another 1% mapped to convenient alternatives. For the remaining 1%, custom keys on the original hardware that can’t be mapped, I’ve used on-screen virtual keys (the emulator itself uses the F1-F10 keys as proxies so this was trivial in Magic DOSbox).
Thanks again for a terrific program, especially all the customisable touchscreen stuff. I’m not a heavy user of DOS games so this nearly passed me by, but I can foresee quite a few DOS applications getting a touchscreen makeover thanks to Magic DOSbox.
It’s on to do list feature which can help you with FN key. If you press one key then others may have another functionality. But, I still dont have time for that. Hope soon
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