Buttons in HTPC case (2 Viewers)

A

Anonymous

Guest
I've bought a graphic LCD to be installed in my case and since one thing leads to another (will this project ever be finished?) I now would like some buttons on the front panel for controlling MP. I'm thinking of a North-South-East-West layout using a selection button in the center; i.e. 5 buttons in total. I guess that mapping the navigational buttons to the arrow keys and the selection button to the Enter key would make sense.

The problem is how to connect these buttons to the PC and map to appropriate keypresses.

I've seen two possible solutions so far:

1. Using a keyboard controller connected to a PS/2 input.
2. Using a gamepad connected to an USB port.

#1 should make it trivial (?) to map buttons to keys but I doubt that it will work in my case since I would like to be able to use my wireless keyboard from time to time and I'm not sure that Windows will accept and use two keyboards connected simultaneously.

#2 I know nothing about. Is it possible to use the Game controllers applet in the Control panel to map buttons to keypresses?

Other solutions?

If someone who has implemented buttons like this could elaborate a bit on how it's done and the pros and cons of their solution I would be most grateful.

/Nils
 
T

tamagotchi

Guest
Hi,

For having 2 keyboards at the same time, there is no problem. Windows XP is able to have 128 keyboards at the same time.

hope this helps.
 

niekh

Portal Member
October 19, 2004
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tamagotchi
Forgot to mention that I'm using Win2K professional. Can Win2K handle several keyboards?

Schmidti
Nice work! Looks like the GLCD is quite similar to mine (also KS0108). You don't happen to have some links to tutorials/guides for the GLCD as well as the gamepad button mod?

/Nils
 

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