#49 Several suggestions for playing C64 IF in a mobile phone

[Anonymous]

Hello there. I've just found this brilliant emulator and, being an IF (Interactive Fiction, a.k.a. text adventures) afficionado, I immediately tried loading up some games to see if I could play them on the go - Bored of the Rings, A Dark Day Over Paradise and some crappy game about mutant deadly spiders.

Here's what I experienced in my Nokia C3 (QWERTY keyboard), and my suggestions in how this already great emulator could be a wonderful way to play IF - after all, it may not be the majority, but many, many, many, many commodore titles are IF.

First, the overall experience was a bit slow - but I doubt you can do anything about that, there's only so many ways you can optimize your code. Still, I wouldn't mind sacrificing more processing power (if such a thing is possible) to focus on the emulator.

Now, I had some trouble with my QWERTY keyboard. My "enter" key behaved as "space". My "backspace" key did nothing at all. And the keys T, F, H and B (which are also the keys for the numbers 2,4,6,8) did not register. So in order to actually play a text adventure I had to continually go into the menu, select "type text", and then I had to always remember to end up by calling up the menu again and selecting "Ok + Enter". I tried both "Phone keyboard" and "full keyboard", and to be honest, I didn't see a difference.

Now, I understand that different mobiles probably map keys differently, and it would be hard for you to map specific keys to specific... well, keys. I suppose you'd have no guarantee that what you're mapping as "Delete" in one mobile is the same key as in another. But, and here's my suggestion, you could make it customizable. I would very much like to remap those "special keys" - then I could map "Enter" to my enter key, and "Delete" to my backspakce.

Another suggestion would be to make it so that pressing a certain key would automatically bring up the "type text" screen - a toggleable option, of course.

Finally, what about the ability to (again, toggleable) name saved images as they're captured? Again, in text adventures, such an ability would be tremendously helpful.

That's pretty much it. I'm looking forward to your reply. I understand these are probably not big priorities, but they'd make playing text adventures on your emulator a much, much more njoyable experience. :)

[Jörg Jahnke]

Hi,

to answer your questions:
Concerning the speed there is indeed little I can do on the emulator side. I already tried to optimize the emulator for maximum speed and I guess one had to use native C code to get it faster. With Java more is hardly possible.

Regarding the keyboard you are right in that different phone vendors map the keys differently (or so it seems to me). Some mapping in the emulator might solve the problem.

Also snapshot images would be possible.

Sadly I have to say that I am not going to implement such changes anymore. Instead I have focused on the Android version of the emulator, which is available as Mobile C64 in the Android Market. That version - with an up-to-date phone - solves all the issues you mentioned.