Regonising different keyboards as separate devices

Aimead

I haven’t been able to solve this and I’ve been digging into it off and on since last Christmas with no joy. I say that as a warning since this is a problem that is far from trivial.

Occasionally I have younger cousins who regularly come over, and we generally play games running on emulator (eg: old mega drive games). Some games, like Micro Machines or Bomberman, are four player. What I’d like to do is to plug a stack of keyboards into a USB hub so everyone has their own keyboard. The problem is that the emulation software cannot distinguish between, say, an ‘up arrow’ press on keyboard 1 and an ‘up arrow’ press on keyboard 2. Ideally I’d like the OS to be told to treat any plugged-in keyboards as if they were gamepads and to treat each as a different gamepad.

The closest I’ve got to this is to get Linux to recognise different mice, but cannot get the same to happen with keyboards. I’ll try any solution, Windows or Linux.

ED E

If its possible, I doubt its easy.

Traditionally you'd use WASD for one player, and arrows for another. You could do this with multiple keyboards.

P1 WASD
P2 Arrows
P3 Numpad
P4 IJKL

Aimead

Problem with that solution is that accusations of cheating (even if some button presses are accidental) tend to spoil the fun.

I do think it is possible under Windows if the following are accurate:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17123/Using-Raw-Input-from-C-to-handle-multiple-keyboard
http://www.hidmacros.eu/whatisit.php

I just haven’t been able to get any of them to work. The .Net solution works within a .Net program, but I don’t see a way to be able to route emulator input through it. HIDMacros has simply never worked when I’ve tried it.

I do think it is possible, but currently beyond me :-(

FanadMan

OP

Maybe post in Arcade & Retro forum http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=94 Those guys live for these sort of problems