Did any of the later cart titles remove keyboard controls?

Rick Dangerous · November 17, 2015

So I was playing my cart of Lode Runner tonight, on the tan/blue label XEGS style cart, and looking at a manual for the 5.25 floppy version of the game (attached)

All of the keyboard controls worked (pause, restart, extra lives, next level,) but none of the controls to actually MOVE the charachter worked for some reason.

Is it possible the keyboard controls were removed from some of these later XEGS carts, is my keypad broken, or am I just doing it wrong? I am using the BEST electronics keyboard extension cable, btw.

Thanks! Looking forward to getting to the bottom of this mystery.

Lode_Runner_Atari.pdf

Rick Dangerous · November 17, 2015

Dug out the XEGS manual this morning:

"To switch to keyboard controls, hit Control+K"

It's in this manual as well, but a little more hidden.

Sorry guys for the newb threads, just getting used to having the OPTION of the keyboard, and trying to use it (versus just the joystick for all other systems.)

Thanks for bearing with me...

Rybags · November 17, 2015

Some games that rely on keyboard break on later machines.

There's a translation table in the OS that moved location (and was never documented as existing at any guaranteed or fixed address) so any software that relies on doing keyboard translation to ASCII using the OS based table has potential for problems.

A high profile example is Missile Command. The early release cart won't do kb controls properly on XL . They fixed it for the XEGS but rather than using an alternate method just changed the reference to where the table is in the XE Rom - that game is only 6K so it's not like they were short of Rom space. Though it only matters if you dump that version then try to play it on a machine with different key table in it's OS.