Lode Runner joystick buttons trigger extra man cheat

[Seroster]

Hi,

I have tested this with multiple different ROM files and it seems to happen on all of them. This is with Retropie on a Raspberry Pi 4 with the most recent build of linapple as of 2023/08/30.

If I use the keyboard (I think U and O for digging) this doesn't happen, but with joystick, either left or right button does a dig, but it also gives a free life, which is ... just annoying?

[xotmatrix]

This is an interesting bug. For various reasons, I had great difficulty testing this in a VM and gave up. However, I do have some observations that might help locate the underlying issue.

The extra man "cheat" in Lode Runner is CTRL-SHIFT-2. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.

1. Linapple uses this key combo itself which makes it difficult or impossible to type it in the emulated environment, I was unable to read it with my simple test.
2. This key code is 0x80 -- zero with the high-bit set. I can easily imagine some corner-case logic that might spuriously produce this but being unfamiliar with the Linapple code base I did not immediately find it.

EDIT:

I was unable to reproduce the problem in a Linux Mint VM with Linapple built from this repo at the time of this post. I used the mouse buttons to emulate the paddle buttons. They functioned normally in Lode Runner and did not appear to produce any keyboard activity at all in further testing.

[Seroster]

I will pair my controller with my PC again and see if the problem occurs in AppleWin as well.

PS With a wired controller, the problem does not occur in AppleWin. I am assuming that provided the software detects the joystick, it doesn't matter whether it's a wireless or wired controller. (I'd rather not have to try to re-pair my controller with the Raspberry Pi after because that was a real pain.)

[Seroster]

A few thoughts:

(1) Possibly avoidable if CTRL-SHIFT-2 was not used by LinApple. I might have to investigate making a local build of LinApple... is it possible to change the control code?
(2) If I had a better Bluetooth keyboard I could just ... use that.
(3) I see how not much dev is being done on LinApple which is understandable. Has anyone tried getting the Linux version of AppleWin to work with Retropie?