Keys not working when using physical keyboard in EmulationStation Desktop Edition

GP77

Hello everybody,
i have installed on my laptop Retroarch 1.19.1 and EmulationStation Desktop Edition 3.2.0. I have a usb keyboard that has been automatically detected and that i use to navigate in the menu in retroarch and ES-DE.
So far so good, but when i try to play with Amiga or PC games and i need the full use of my keyboard, several keys are not working:

some of them are doing ES-DE action (Esc key for example, if pressed twice will exit the program)
some of them produces empty output
.... and few of them (key 'B') for example are correctly working!

i suspect that ES-DE is intercepting my keyboard input and this can be helpful to do quick action (resize screen, exit program...) but also very annoying as i would have to use my physical keyboards with all its keys! I don't like to use virtual keyboard, of course.
I hope i explained clearly the situation, thanks a lot in advance for the support.

mitu

though this is not the right forum, I'll allow it.

I don't think ES-DE is intercepting anything, it's rather the default behavior of RetroArch of mapping some of the keys to its functions/operations (including the double Esc which is by default to exit the emulator).

This is problematic for computer based cores, which need to emulate the full keyboard. What you need is to turn on Game Focus by pressing Scroll Lock - see https://docs.libretro.com/guides/input-and-controls/#cores-with-direct-keyboard-input - in order for RetroArch to stop interpreting your keys and send them to the core.

GP77

@mitu said in Keys not working when using physical keyboard in EmulationStation Desktop Edition:

you need is to turn on Game Focus by pressing Scroll Lock

Thanks a lot mitu for your quick and precise answer. I confirm that pressing the Scroll Lock key i see a notification on screen (Game Focus On) and the keyboard full keyset is available!
I guess we can tag this post as solved ;)
And huge thanks as well to have allowed this post