For those who have Commodore 64 in their cabinets, heres a question.

[MydknyteStyrm]

I am currently setting up VICE in Hyperspin, and I had owned an actual C64 back in the day. Most if not all the games required some sort of keypress, including but not limited to spacebars, F1, Run/Stop, and more. If you have C64 in your cabinet, how did you get around this issue? I kind of want to avoid having a keyboard in a drawer in my cabinet, but that seems like the only solution so far. Can anyone out there impart some knowledge? Thanks!

[volumetric]

That's a tough one, i dont think there is any obvious solution. One thing you could try if you're feeling brave would be to remap keys via hyperlaunch. You could remap buttons you would normally use for coin and start and change them to things like enter, space etc. But you still may end up running out of buttons. Im actually considering getting a small wireless keyboard to fix this issue with 64 and amiga.

[Circo]

I use one of these

http://www.buy.com/prod/wireless-bluetooth-rii-mini-keyboard-touchpad-mouse-for-pc-laptop/238870786.html?listingId=245127540

this looks pretty cool too

http://www.dhgate.com/hot-2-4ghz-rii-mini-i8-wireless-92-key-qwerty/p-ff80808137e9df4b0138090bced014db.html#s1-3-null

When your emulating a computer your really going to need a keyboard, you will end up with a true frankenpanel trying to get enough buttons on it to do it right

[brolly]

Yeah once you start emulating personal computers you should really consider getting a keyboard, because some games will actually require it. Riimote stuff is pretty cool and really small. You can also do what volumetric suggested and remap the required buttons to your gamepad, since buttons are different from game to game I suggest creating ahk remaps on a per game basis that way you'll never run out of keys unless the game requires a lot of keys for gameplay and in that case you're much better off with a keyboard anyway. You can map the most commonly used keys by default.

[epetti]

I only have a handful of games and for the first two (Boulder Dash and Boulder Dash II), I was able to get away without any real need for the keyboard. Now I'm trying to setup Lode Runner, and for the most part also just the basic ahk keymapper is working. However, just getting started I need to enable the keyboard by pressing Tab-K and to reset a game I need to press Tab-R. If I just had those two I would be set, and I wanted to remap them to Player 1 start and just a coin button or something. Does the ahk keymapper support mapping one key to a combination press if it isn't the special Ctrl or Alt keys? Any suggestions on this?

But essentially, if it's a fixed set of buttons you ever need to press, I'd say just map those, and if you have to, add one or two dedicated buttons to your control panel and you should be all set.

[jensrobot]

stumbled over this post by coincidence. I am in the process of building a collection in hyperspin, still a rookie, but i'm not complete noob with emulators and i do have experience with other front-end.

Ok so i started making my own list for c64. So far i did complete sets of other systems, but with c64 i went for a "best of" consisting of the top ~100 games based on ratings at c64.com. Also I added a few personal favorites i remembered from my childhood.

I then started testing all the games and faced the problem of this threads topic. Many different crackers with all kind of required keypresses, trainers etc. I then started finding alternate versions of games that would require little to no keyboard input. Loading time was considered too and it was going really good actually until i reached a couple of frustrating ones... compromises and jadada. Then out of the blue i found that the newest version of WinVICE - which i prefer to use, had a nifty "savestate" feature called snapshot. This seems to really be what i want, i could then go through all of my games, make savestates for all games, then throw all the savestate files in one folder, set this as rom folder in hyperspin. We can do this because VICE can be launched with a save the same way as with disk/rom image. I initially thought i needed the roms still for reference, as i believed the savestate files where only "shortcuts", but it turn out vice can also store the disk image in that save file.

So I realize this is a year old thread, but i felt your question deserved another answer

I'm really curious to hear from the VICE experts out there, to whether this approach has any flaws. It's still just an idea, and i only did this with one game so far to test it out. Bruce Lee! D: It launches straight to the game main menu in less than 2 secs. So does this approach have any drawbacks i haven't considered ?

I don't like the idea of a keyboard attached to my final system

[Tristeele]

I love this idea.... I actually do something different then most users in that I have a main wheel for each emu and only place my favorite games for that system in it. Then I have a genre wheel for each system and on the genre wheel I have a 'complete collection' wheel. So when I get to C64 - I will do just as you suggest on my favs and leave the others to load up with keyboard press until I get to them. Anyway - nice idea.... I did this to hide games I hadnt messed with yet - or hadnt set controls on. So every game available works 100 percent for users.