Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Yeah, the more I play around with this the more convinced I am that I may be misremembering, which is frightening as we’re only talking about a couple of months ago. Even the documentation and Facebook posts I made while playing with the emulators are non-specific enough to be interpreted either way. I’m wondering whether I simply spent so much time inside the emulators that I didn’t notice it was also changing the system default.
If I get the chance at the weekend I’ll have a play with some of those “per-app switching” apps.
I would be great if Magic DosBox could have its own input method that could directly read and translate arbitrary hardware buttons/keys. The button mapper is useful but limited by whatever it sees when keys are pressed, and it’s unclear why SwiftKey generates more consistent and detectable scancodes than the default keyboard (at least on the Gemini). Most of the third-party IMEs, even those aimed at external keyboards, aren’t as consistent as SwiftKey.
But to be fair the Gemini keyboard is a bit of a kludge itself, and I don’t expect its creators gave much thought to it being used in emulating other entire operating systems. It works really well with native Android apps, even those obviously not designed with anything other than touchscreens and virtual keys in mind, so it does its job.
Of course I’m also aware that Magic DosBox itself, and the bulk of of the software (mostly games) run on it, wouldn’t normally expect to see more than a half dozen inputs so maybe I’m expecting too much of it and the Gemini hardware.
My main reason for using Magic DosBox for all this is the fantastic support for custom on-screen graphics and virtual buttons, and for that it doesn’t disappoint. For the curious, this video is something I cobbled together to demonstrate usability differences between the Agenda app on three platforms (emulated Psion 3a, emulated Psion 5mx, and native Gemini). The first 23 seconds shows the 3a emulation. The icons at the bottom of the screen are all Magic DosBox virtual buttons replicating the softkey button bar of an original Series 3a, while the rest of the screen is the DOS-based emulator, scaled and positioned above it. The visuals are seamless. Only Magic DosBox can do this! 😉
The second emulator is Windows-based and mouse-driven, so its button emulation is built in. It normally runs in a window though, so Magic DosBox came to the rescue again with its custom scaling making it fit the screen perfectly. I can’t praise the customisation available in this program enough.
Thanks guys, much appreciated.
Can I be cheeky and ask one more question that’s only tangentially connected to all this, rather than starting another thread?
I have two sets of keyboard software installed on the Gemini; one is the built-in support for the on-board physical keyboard and the other is SwiftKey which I’ve found to offer better compatibility between the hardware keyboard and various emulators including UAE4ARM and Magic DosBox. (Someone in another group suggested this might be because both emulators use Simple Directmedia Layer which does its own non-native hardware polling, but I’m not sure). Long story short: some of the hardware keys, especially Ctrl- or Fn- modified keys, are easier to read or remap if SwiftKey is selected as the input for the hardware keyboard rather than the default Gemini input.
Prior to these recent behavioural changes I’m almost 100% certain that I used to be able to specify SwiftKey as the input layer for Magic DosBox (via General Settings | Input Method) while leaving the Gemini’s own keyboard as the default for the OS and all other apps. This gave the extra compatibility for the emulators, while preventing SwiftKey from getting in the way of other apps.
This has recently changed, and now whenever I select SwiftKey from within Magic DosBox it changes the default for the whole OS. I have to use the little keyboard icon on the Navigation Bar to switch it off again in other apps, which also switches it off in Magic DosBox.
A quick search for “android keyboard per-app” shows a multitude of third-party apps that seem to offer this functionality, suggesting that it’s never been a natively supported feature of Android. But I’m puzzled because I would have bet good money that it was working independently a few weeks ago.
I’m really hoping it’s another silly switch that I’ve missed, like the one for auto-close, but I suspect this one might be a bit deeper and outside of the scope of Magic DosBox itself. The latest Gemini firmware had a slightly updated keyboard wizard for setting the hardware keyboard’s language following a reboot, so it’s likely other things have also changed under the hood. If I had to take a wild stab at a culprit, I fear it might be this. But since I’ve had better answers in here than I’ve had elsewhere (even if the initial question turned out to be a ridiculous self-own) I figured I’d mention it just in case there’s an Android expert in the room who can offer me an equally face-palmable answer to this one.
Thanks!
Oh, man, how did I miss those? Thank you! I must have looked at those options a dozen times while investigating and not realised that they weren’t all checked before. Unchecking the top one fixed it, obviously. It’s right there in the words!
I should have thought to double check every setting because one or more recent firmware and/or app updates managed to change a whole bunch of random settings e.g. Nova Launcher was showing app tray tabs in the wrong order, and one of my calendars had its sync option disabled.
A bit OT, but is this the sort of thing that happens occasionally with Android? That firmware and/or app updates can alter settings? I must confess Android still feels new and confusing to me, despite using it for months now. I suspect some aspects of it always will.
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.
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.
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.
