Public Commander Keen Forum

Hello, when I press right Alt on my keyboard, Keen doesn't jump with pogo, but when I press left Alt, he jumps with that. And the problem is when I configure action button 9 (pogo), so that it is now right Alt, it show CTRL, not ALT.

What to do?

You're probably running into problems with non-English keyboard layouts. For example, on a German keyboard, the right Alt key is labeled "Alt Gr" and works like pressing Ctrl and Alt simultaneously. That might be the reason why the game registers that key as the Ctrl key.

I ran into similar issues with the German keyboard layout and I don't remember if I was able to fix it, since I usually stick to using the left Ctrl and Alt keys for games. Maybe you should try setting your keyboard layout to English in Windows as well as in DOSBox, that might fix the problem.

That seems to be precisely it, according to some quick research the Hungarian keyboard layout also uses AltGr for the right key.

Do try switching your layout, Szemi.

You can also try remapping the key within DOSBox. I have the right-alt configured as AltGr on my system and I was able to tell DOSBox to treat AltGr as right-alt, but I'm on Linux so it might be different there. In the default DOSBox keymap you can press Alt+F1 while DOSBox is running to reconfigure the keyboard. Click on the right-alt key in the keyboard diagram to select it, then use the 'add' button towards the bottom of the screen to add a new key mapping, and see if it will let you add the AltGr key.

If you're getting a jump as if Ctrl is pressed, then you might have to select each Ctrl key in turn and use the 'Next' button a few times to see all the keys that map to Ctrl, and delete AltGr if it's listed.

Incidentally, I find this very useful to change the screenshot key to one of the extra keys on my keyboard, as this allows me to take a screenshot without pressing any keys that the DOS game would pick up. Same for the various capture/recording keys, so you can start a capture without pressing a key that makes the game stop doing whatever it is that you're trying to capture.

It's also possible to patch the Keen games to take different keyboard layouts like Dvorak, which is fun.