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Joystick to Keyboard?
So does anyone use joystick to keyboard style keymappers?
It seems for multi-player games, this might be the way to go.
I know I keep some good ol' Gravis usb control pads around, but haven't made any of the projects i had in mind. But what with my access to laptops and projector screens and my love of trainwrecks and of multiplayer games and knowing stuff like that Mario War is out there, I really should get better at this kind of setup...
Is there a standard Windows "get control pads to hit keys for game" solution?
JoyToKey and GlovePie
I use JoyToKey for absolutely everything. A few years ago, I started collecting USB gamepads, out of my interest in emulating multiplayer arcade games. But I didn't stop at the usual 4 gamepads. After finding JoyToKey, I started coding flash games for up to 8 players on a single system. I've never put these games online, but I've been considering posting them here. I had a standard mapping that I used for each game, with four directionals and two buttons each. I've also been looking into GlovePie, for using up to 7 WiiMotes at once, following the same mapping.
(Nearly) unlimited inputs is another one of the big advantages to PC games, even if most people assume no more than two people can look at a monitor at the same time.
Cool, I'll try it. Does it
Cool, I'll try it.
Does it have any of the old "can't read these 2 keys at the same time" issue, or does it bypass that?
For people w/ projectors, or TVs w/ VGA inputs (or laptops w/ HDMI etc outputs), it seems like there's some super cool console-like stuff that could go on.
Heh, once upon a time, I was really into http://pascal.sources.ru/hardware/multijoy.htm though I never got around to building it -- it was this parallel port thing to connect 6 atari joysticks at once. I remember at one point I saw versions of Joust, Bomberman, Tron, maybe some kind of Atari 2600 Combat.... I was hosting a mirror at my website once upon a time (man, Internet Wayback Machine - such a lovely idea, but not the most robust hardware)
Oh, double heh, I remember freshman year of college ('92) and there was this Combat-like tank game for 3 players on one keyboard... wish I could remember what it was called.
Oh, there's my old
Oh, there's my old page:
http://web.archive.bibalex.org/web/19971009093014/www.alienbill.com/vgames/multijoy/
hmm, guess I should try to fire up dosbox to get that stuff to work.
To my knowledge, limitations
To my knowledge, limitations on concurrent keystrokes are strictly hardware-based, due to the circuitry in the keyboards themselves. That's why you see things like special gaming keyboards claiming more concurrent keystrokes at a time. It's also why certain combinations of keystrokes will work on some systems and not on others.
As many keys as you want!
As far as I can tell, it doesn't have any limitations on how many keys are pressed at once, or which keys are pressed at the same time. I've played my games with 7 players, 6 discrete inputs each, with JoyToKey. That's seven people holding down as many as 4 keys at once (holding a diagonal, and both buttons down), and I've never seen it skip a key. I think this is because it is not relying on a physical model of the keyboard, and simulated keypresses don't suffer from the physical limitations of the keyboard circuitry.
Multijoy looks interesting, but I've never been one to solder. I guess digital switch gamepads and USB hubs are so cheap that I've never seen the need to do any physical hacking to get my input sources.
Yeah, I got interested in
Yeah, I got interested in Multijoy before USB was common.
I think I actually bought some of the hardware for it along with my Uncle. Now i guess computers don't even have parallel ports...
Actually, MultiJoy was probably always a banner for Glorious Trainwreck ... all homebrew, games that were likely fun and cool because they were multiplayer when that was a true rarity, and a tiny, tiny potential audience of people who actually put the hardware together
I mean, look at this...
http://www.oocities.com/hzuegel/alien.html
I feel a little guilty because I guess at some point I took down the link that it considers the "unofficial multijoy homepage" (in fact I might've been billing it as that..)
Homebrew Multiplayer is the BEST
Oh wow, that link looks amazing. Time to break out Dosbox this weekend and give that a try with some friends.
Thank you so much for posting these links, I'm always looking for more interesting multiplayer single system games (as my avatar should indicate if you're familiar Amiga games). Another favorite of mine has been Mine Bomber which was supposed to get a sequel at some point, but the original is incredibly fun. Think of it as a slightly higher-resolution bomberman, with explosions that radiate from a center point, instead of simply creating a cross shape. The best part are bombs that respect the volume of the explosion, without destroying walls. They aren't too dangerous in open areas, but become hallway-filling hilarity in tighter spots.
Anybody else have some 4 or more single system games they want to share?
4 player gaming has always
4 player gaming has always been a "thing" of mine, admittedly more from a console point of view-- ever since Atari 2600 Warlords (brilliant game, but I've always been struck by the quirk of game geography that means a shot against the wall (usually the most dangerous kind) from the top right player to the bottom right player will bounce in and out harmlessly from that players castle).
ANYWAY. That's one of the reasons I was such a Nintendo fanboy- putting 4 ports on the N64, the first system to do that since, what, the Atari 8bits? (and some time w/ the Turbo Grafx...)
ANYWAY ANYWAY - it looks like a very different game, but your description at first reminded me of "Bomberman 64" - I've got to get a copy of this, I lost my old one - instead of the usual mazeness, it's a fairly open field, picking up and throwing bombs that explode is nice sensible spheres of sound and fury.
I always had a dream of some kind of homebrew/opensource/extensible "Mario Party" like game -- it's totally unfair, the amount of shit this series gets, because the core idea is FANTASTIC -- retro-style minigames (along with a commitment to decent AI for when you don't have a full set of 4 players) -- but then the serious messes everything up by putting all kinds of randomness and stupidity in the slow, slow board game (the Original Mario Party had it perfect, this little, fast moving boardgame, just enough to add a touch of randomness and assign players to various teams)
As retarded as I am with KNP, maybe that would be an awesome joint project... KLIK-N-PARTY THE GAME, just all the 4 player minigames we can think of in one big mess....