Keyboard stuck in Silkworm

[SailorSat]

Yo...
I have a pretty simple but troubling problem with Silkworm.

The Keyboard gets "stuck" when playing the jeep and pressing more than one button at a time. Most times the game keeps thinking a key is pressed until I tap that key again.

At first I though its a problem with my PC keyboard (running in WinUAE) but it also happend after I remaped my gamepad to the keyboard keys.
So I though it was a WinUAE related problem and didn't look into it any further.


So now I recently dusted off my good old A500s, checked some of the way-to-many disk flying around in "that box" and stumbled accross a copy of Silkworm.

Now guess what... The keys get stuck on my A500! (actually I own 3)
Thats actually driving me mad... I am 100% sure we used that very A500 and that disk "back in the good old times" and we NEVER had any problems like that.

I even tried several different copies I got from a friend (even with different cracktro...) and still have that problem.


Does anybody know whats happening or even better anyone got a solution?


P.S. specs of the machines...
A500 #1: Kick 1.2, 512k Chip, 512k Fast (A501), Rev. 5 Board, Red Power Led (but not C= Key :()
A500 #2: Kick 1.3, 1M Chip (512k+512k Expansion), 2M Fast (A590), Rev. 6A Board, Green Led
A500 #3: Kick 2.0, 1M Chip, 4M Fast (Octagon), Rev 6A Board, Green Led
(A600 in basic config also tested, same problem)

[lilalurl]

You should give a try to the whdload version of the game and see if that solves the issue, since it is mentioned in the info (http://whdload.de/games/Silkworm.html):
Version 1.2 (12.05.03) by JOTD
- empty dbf loops fixed
- keyboard fixed
- hiscores fixed


I suppose it refers to the issue you describe.

[SailorSat]

Hm... I tried both the loader v1.2, as the newer v1.4 from the authors website which doesn't have a changelog for whatever reason.

In both cases, the keyboard still gets stuck :(

[Shadowfire]

Your keyboard is having ghosting problems. I'm afraid you can't fix the problem without getting another, different keyboard. It's a design issue with some keyboards, the way they are electrically constructed, they only expect certain keys (CTRL, ALT, Shifft, etc.) to be held down in addition to regular keys.

Edit: whoops, I didn't read the entire post correctly, please ignore this. I guess it's time to go to bed :)

[SailorSat]

Now I finally made some progress.
It seems the AMIGA keyboard is the problem.

My old one (Red Light, Cherry Switches) works perfectly fine.
My new one (Green Light, Mitsumi PVC) doesn't work.
(And WinUAE doesn't work either.)

May it be the older keyboards had a higher clock than the new ones?

[Toni Wilen]

Interesting..

Game has buggy keyboard read routine. It fails to correctly send signal back to keyboard that acknowledges the keycode.

It sets kb serial line to output mode temporarily as expected but then it forgets to write to serial data register that starts the handshake signal..

Perhaps this causes really short pulse and some keyboards "accidentally" detect this and some don't. (HRM says pulse should be at least 85us)

EDIT: I remembered wrong, above should work just fine.. Perhaps the signal is TOO long (one frame, 1/50 seconds) and this confuses some keyboards.

[andreas]

Toni, a suggestion: you could send specially crafted test program to SailorSat and verify results. Probably the only way out because SailorSat's hardware (?) problems could unlikely be reproduced by all and sundry...