General usage

Please also read the article of the given emulator for more information at the INDEX page. This article is about the general usage only, emulators can have special things.

Keyboard

Emulators has positional keyboard emulation (rather than symbolic). Though, in same cased "virtual shift" is emulated for some keys (like cursor keys for C65/M65 or even VIC20, though this latter one didn't have this feature for real!)

Hot-keys

• F9: exit emulator
• F10: reset machine (not all emulation implement this)
• F11: toggle between windowed and full-screen modes

If emulator implements joystick emulation

• USB joysticks / game controllers can be used. However currently there is no sane mapping, ie you can guess witch stick can be used :) XBox-360 controller is tested at least, and it worked for me.
• In addition of USB joysticks, right CTRL is the fire button
• In addition of USB joysticks, the following numeric keypad keys can be used:
• 8: up
• 2: down
• 4: left
• 6: right
• 0: fire (note: right CTRL is also this for easier usage)
• If an emulator implements two joystick ports (ie: C65, M65), you can use Enter on the numeric keypad to switch between the ports, it's valid selection for both of USB joystick and numeric keypad joystick emulation

Mega 65

When using Xemu for the emulation of a Mega 65 the following examples might help you using the positional mapping and customising it if needed.

Layout

When using a real Mega 65 a keyboard layout related to the old Commodore machines is encountered. How can this be adapted to a PC/Mac ? It's not that hard. Most of the keys for writing stay the same - given an American layout. So also special character reached by [Shift] and a number are same to a U.S. keyboard.

The closer you get to [Enter] or [Backspace] keys you will find a whole column of keys missing. Yes, even a C64-keyboard had this extra set of keys. For Xemu those are mainly operated with the six keys above the cursor keys. There you also find [Run Stop], completely of in comparison to C64 emulator like VICE. The reason is, a Mega 65 even has an [Esc] key. So some keys are approaching a more modern layout.

xemu-extended-keyboard.pdf • Download original SVG

As you might spot quickly with this setup [Stop][Restore] could be done single-handed.

Please be aware this image shows graphics symbols being reached in the orientation the [Mega] and [SHIFT] key are positioned on a real Mega 65. On a PC keyboard it is crossovered, unfortunately. So, while [Mega][s] gives you the upper right corner of a rectangle [SHIFT][S] gives you the heart symbol every new C64 owner must have tried first in the eightees.

For the PC styled special character keys the lower symbol is reched without the use of modifier keys. The upper symbol shows what you get in conjunction with the [SHIFT] key.

Xemu lets you have two joysticks (one at a time) on the numeric keypad. [Enter] over there is used to toggle ports 1, 2 and to off when pressed repeatedly.

Remapping

Please be aware the emulator on default catches [F9][F10][F11] as shortcuts of its own functions. See this explained here. If you want those keys to be used by the Mega 65 you need to setup an own keyboard mapping by copying keymap-default.cfg into keymap.cfg and then removing the following lines:

XEMU-EXIT F9
XEMU-FULLSCREEN F11

and changing:

F9 Unknown
F11 Unknown

into:

F9 F9
F11 F11

Fullscreen and exiting Xemu is still available in the menu you reach by right mouse clicking into the emu's main window.