5.2 Input¶
Keyboard¶
Your PC keyboard is mapped onto the Spectrum's. Letters, digits, Enter and Space are where you expect; the rest of the Spectrum's oddities are reachable through modifiers:
| PC key | Spectrum key |
|---|---|
| Shift (either) | Caps Shift |
| Ctrl (either) | Symbol Shift |
| Backspace | Delete |
| Arrow keys | Cursor keys |
| Esc | Break |
| Tab | Extend Mode |
| Caps Lock | Caps Lock |
Key left of 1 |
True Video |
\ |
Inverse Video |
Alt + key left of 1 |
Inverse Video |
| Alt + E | Edit |
| Alt + G | Graph |
| Alt + C | Caps Lock |
' ; . , |
" ; . , |
/ - = |
/ - = (Symbol Shift + V / J / L) |
| Shift + digit | Caps Shift + that digit |
| Shift + symbol key | Caps Shift + that symbol key |
Those last two rows are how you reach the Caps Shift layer without hunting for it: Shift+1 is Edit, Shift+2 Caps Lock, Shift+3 True Video, Shift+4 Inverse Video, Shift+5 to Shift+8 the four cursor keys, Shift+9 Graph and Shift+0 Delete. JNEXT keys off the physical key you pressed, not the character your host layout produces for it — the same way the Next's own PS/2 keymap treats the shift keys as a separate overlay. Earlier versions looked at the character instead, so all nineteen shifted digits and symbols were thrown away before the Spectrum saw them.
Three things catch people out:
- Shift is Caps Shift and Ctrl is Symbol Shift — the same way round as a real Spectrum Next with a PC keyboard plugged into it. Earlier versions had these two swapped.
- Esc is Break, not "get me out of fullscreen". Fullscreen is F11 and only F11.
- Alt is a host modifier, never a Spectrum key. Only the four Alt combinations above are used, because the menu bar and the menu shortcuts claim the rest.
Ctrl belongs to the program you are running. No Ctrl+letter chord of any
kind is a JNEXT shortcut, so the Symbol Shift sequences NextBASIC leans on —
Ctrl+O ;, Ctrl+D STEP, Ctrl+R <, Ctrl+T >, Ctrl+Q <=, Ctrl+S | —
all reach the guest, and so does Ctrl+Shift+S (Caps Shift + Symbol Shift + S).
Earlier versions bound those to menu commands, which meant the program never
saw them (and Ctrl+Q quit JNEXT outright). They live on Alt now:
Save Snapshot, the last one to move, is Alt+Shift+S. The only Ctrl chords
JNEXT still takes are Ctrl+F5 and Ctrl+F6 (start and stop video recording),
and function keys have no Spectrum meaning to lose.
On real Next hardware Left Alt is Extend Mode and Right Alt is Graph. JNEXT does not do that: Alt is reserved for the host, and Extend Mode is on Tab — the same convention FUSE and ZEsarUX use. That is a deliberate trade, made so that Ctrl could be given back to the guest.
The machine's own front-panel keys are on function keys: F1 hard reset,
F4 soft reset, F9 Multiface NMI, F10 DivMMC. (With the debugger
open, F9 belongs to the debugger.) The two resets are also in the Machine
menu and on the toolbar: Power Reset (Alt+R, same as F1) is a power
off/on cold boot that re-runs the whole boot chain; Soft Reset (same as
F4) is the front-panel reset button — it returns to NextZXOS without
re-running the boot chain. Soft Reset does nothing while the firmware is
still booting. After a direct --load it resets into 48K BASIC and discards
the program you loaded: that boot never ran the firmware, so there is no
NextZXOS to come back to — use Power Reset there.
Joysticks and gamepads¶
Up to two USB gamepads are picked up automatically, hot-plug included, and wired to the Next's two joystick connectors. The joystick protocol — Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor or MD — is chosen by the software you are running, just as on real hardware, so a game that expects Kempston gets Kempston without you configuring anything.
With no gamepad, point a connector at the host cursor keys instead: arrows to
move, Space to fire. Choose it in the Input menu, in Settings >
Preferences > Input, or with --joy1-source keys / --joy2-source keys;
the choice is remembered.
Only one connector can use the cursor keys at a time, and while it does, the arrows and Space stop working as ZX keys.
Mouse¶
For software that uses a Kempston mouse, JNEXT has to confine your pointer — otherwise it hits the edge of your screen and the emulated pointer stops.
- Capture: click the emulator screen, or use Input > Capture Mouse.
- Release: Ctrl+Alt, the same combination VirtualBox and QEMU use.
Capture is off until you ask for it, so the pointer stays yours and you can always reach the menus. While captured, the status bar reminds you how to get out. The click that captures is not passed through to the program.