People,
I'm translating Snatcher to portuguese and then to English. At this time, the translation is going very well, and I'll release betas as soon as the final programming problems finish. I found a little problem that I'm not being able to solve. The game reads the columns and lines of the keyboard to find what key is pressed. It's the only way, since it replaces the interrupt. But this is not the point. At one place, the game converts the data (line and column got on the key matrix) to a character value, based on a internal table. This table originaly pointed to Kanji/Hiragana characters (Japanese language). I converted them ASCII values and it really works... well... in some machines. The problem resides in the fact the relation line/column -> ASCII is NOT defaut. It seems to be different on several machines, even if they are from the same country and have similar keyboard. The result is: in some computers, the keys act as expected (when you press the "A" key, the A appears on the screen). But on other computers, when you press the "A" key, something different appears (say, an "8" is shown). Once there is no default way to convert a line/colum from keymatrix to a ASCII code (the BIOS has a table, but it's position is not the same in every computer), I think the solution is to preload the proper convertion table in the upper memory (say, on the PLAY queue space) and point the game to look there. This would be ok IF I knew a way to detect what the hell kind of keyboard the machine uses. One way to detect it is asking to the user to push some keys, but this is very annoying and not compatible with the work I'm doing on Snatcher. I'm writting here in the hope someone know a misterious way to detect the keyboard type. Before someone ask me, I know the byte 0x002C of ROM says me the keyboard type. But this means nothing. On computers with the same value for this byte, the answer of the key matrix was different one from another. )^= BTW, Snatcher is non-standard in many aspects. This is one of them. Konami never thought to release this game outside its county (this explains why they do not worried about differente keyboard types than the japanese one). I hope someone can help me, and I can continue the translation. Thanx in advance. Daniel Caetano PS: The actual stage of translation is somewhat more advanced than Oasis was. But as soon as this problem is fixed, the translation will not be hard, since I had developed several programs that automatically replaces the texts and relocate them when they do not fit in the space. []'s Daniel Caetano [EMAIL PROTECTED] ..."A necessidade de criatividade e' o que contribui para a mudanca. A criatividade mantem o criador vivo." (Frank Herbert) http://soulmatrix.dynodns.net/ - This OS/2 system uptime is 0 days 05:42 hours. -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
