Keyboard issue with BasiliskII

[yserra]

Hi all,
How can I configure BasiliskII (Mac emulator) to use the right layout of my keyboard ?

Typing numbers for instance (the upper ones, on top of letters, not the ones from the numpad) produce symbols not related to my layout. Worse, my keyboard is configured as French in Retropie and configured as French under the emulated Mac System 7.6.1, but its layout appears as a QWERTY one when I type under the emulated environment (in a text editor, for instance). And, if I turn the keyboard into a British/American layout under System 7.6.1, it becomes AZERTY (the French layout...) but, still, the numbers and other symbols are wrong.

This behavior is supposed to be normal with BasiliskII. On other platforms (I use BasiliskII on my real Mac, too), you only have to use a file, named "keycodes" to get the layout of the host machine under the emulated environment. And I should mention my keyboard works perfectly with the expected layout under other RetroPie emulated systems (Amstrad CPC, C64, Amiga...)

So, what I did is:
Copy the file keycodes from the BasiliskII installation on my Mac to the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh RetroPie directory and changed the config file /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg with these lines:

keycodes true
keycodefile /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/keycodes

But it doesn't work.
Would you share with me a better solution?
Many thanks !

[yserra]

Ok, I finally found the answer myself.

So, first, there is actually a 'keycodes' file provided with the RetroPie release of BasilikII. There is no need to manually import a new one. The path to this file is:

/opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/share/BasiliskII/keycodes

For an unknown reason, opening this file from basiliskii.cfg (with the line keycodefile /opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/share/BasiliskII/keycodes) does not work. I have no idea why.

BUT. It works if you put it as an option from the command line that launches BasiliskII. So, if you have an international keyboard like me, edit the launching script:

sudo nano /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/emulators.cfg

And replace the first line with this one:

basilisk = "/opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/bin/BasiliskII --rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/mac.rom --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh
/disk.img --extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh --keycodes true --keycodefile /opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/share/BasiliskII/keycodes --conf
ig /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg "

And, tadam! French/German, now you have a working Azerty/Qwertz layout under the emulated Mac System 7.

[BuZz]

@yserra btw the line will be replaced upgrading. You can protect against this by adding a new line with the key "basilisk-mine = " ... etc" and switching the default value to that (or switch via runcommand). Call the name anything you like so long as it's unique from the default name.

Is your change specific to certain layouts, or should this be a default - it sounded like you thought this file should have been loaded by default but wasn't. That could be something we can fix.

[BuZz]

Oh and thanks for the info btw. I updated previous post btw with a few corrections.

[yserra]

Many thanks for your advice @BuZz. I modified the startup script as you mentioned and it still works.

My understanding is that BasiliskII should ever load the 'keycodes' file so the host keyboard layout (the one configured in Raspbian/RetroPie, here) is taken into account, whatever international layout it is. Without the 'keycodes' file, only US-layout would be recognized and typing from another host keyboard layout (i.e French AZERTY, German QWERTZ...) under Basilisk would produce weird result. If I understand well, the keycodes file contains the USB keycode for any environment BasiliskII has been built for (so, the Linux framebuffer, here).

By the way, loading or not this keycodes files every time BasiliskII starts is not necessarily the most important point. With your permission, I would rather suggest that there is something to fix somewhere, since BasiliskII doesn't open this file when it is told to do so from its basiliskii.cfg config file.