Input Problem with Gamer Keyboards

On both Blitzmax and Blitz3D, I've had a couple of users with souped up "gamer" keyboards that experienced problems where all other input was cut off and they automatically veered to the right.

In the most recent case, they were using a Saitek Eclipse. Has anyone heard of this and know of a decent workaround?

Thanks

I have an eclipse keyboard and had a similar problem with Thief 3. The only way I found to fix it was to open device manager where I found that the Saitek keyboard had been added 2 or more times and disable the duplicate keyboards.

I am unaware of any other fixes.

Cheers

Garion

I have a Saitek Eclipse - I've never had any problems with it.

I just got a test result back from the user with the Eclipse, where it actually registers itself as a gamepad port and all of the idle axis readings return as -1.0.

So I guess I just need to check JoyAxisCaps to ensure that I'm not reading any bogus values.

This was also seen by Terry Bull in my shoot 'em up (this thread). So it is a hardware issue? (Assuming it is not a problem in my code.) In my game I am only reading input from the keyboard using keyDown and keyHit.

Foppy, I think that's something different. If it was the same problem, he would've experienced it immediately. Also, it would only effect you if you were polling one of the joy functions.

I could be wrong, but I think the only way around the problem in Blitz3D is to get an initial read for the idle values of each axis and if they are too far from zero, ignore the entire port.

My fix in Blitzmax is to check JoyAxisCaps() that the axis is active before reading from it.

I have just come across the problem for the first time:

"James Boyd's" 'Shooter' invoked the problem due to his use of Blitz's 'Joy' commands.

Rem'ing out the 'Joy' stuff resolves it.

My Saitek keyboard shows up in 'Game Controllers' - well, the ' Command Pad' does. However, I do not have a ' Command Pad'. Not all Saitek keyboards have the ' Command Pad', I think Windows and the Saitek installer just assume you do.

So, I'm suspicious that it is Windows' belief that the user has the 'Command Pad' which is causing the problem - not the keyboard itself.