A command suggestion

[Serious Callers Only]

Hi. There is something that alway bothered me in the command schemes of most consoles, the use of a directional pad in some games when a mouse like input type would make more sense. I hope i'm not bothering the devs with a senseless suggestion, but i think it might be possible to simulate that pad using a mouse. I belive that the n-rage n64 input plugin does this. Again, i reiterate, its not very useful for most action games, but it might be nice for some slower paced grid like strategy games.

Any reason why this is impossible?

[Bent]

I am not sure I understand. You want to use an analog input to simulate a digital pad input? What would be the point of this? It wouldn't work the same was as the NRage plugin, the snes never had any analog input device, unless you count the mouse.

[LobStar]

Maybe it could make FF6 Blitz more fun to do . Even still, I don't think it would be terribly hard to implement however, I feel some sort of onscreen display in the corner (after calibrating the mouse of course) would let you see the mouses general orientation so you have some idea whats going on. I'm not one to speak for input dev at all but I don't think it would need TOO much work to do since ZSNES aleady can make use of the mouse in the GUI.

[blackmyst]

Soooo....instead of pressing the buttons on your keyboard/joypad, you want to press them onscreen with your mouse?

Nah, I think I see what he means though (but I'm half guessing here), some games have free moving cursors that can only be controlled by the joypad and not the SNES mouse, it would be nice to be able to use the mouse for those. I believe someone made a hack like that for Front Mission, but it involved modifying the game code itself.

If you wanted to implement something like that in Zsnes itself I think the only way to make it work globally would be to....create some sort of system with high speed tapping on the directional pad in different frequencies, corresponding to mouse movements. But it wouldn't work for many games since they make cursors and characters move with some sort of acceleration to begin with, causing general chaos.

In short: No.

[grinvader]

In short: No.

[Nightcrawler]

It would be possible to hack SNES mouse support into these few games that need it and they'd work on today's ZSNES with no additional coding needed.

You best get to it buster.