Work has been going well for the last few days on the input system overhaul in RetroCopy. Thankfully I've almost finished the template for Sega Master System so the others should fall quickly now.
Light Phaser support is back in, not that playing these games with the mouse is that interesting. What will be interesting is when RetroCopy supports lightgun games in the 3D room! It will make them more challenging and a bit more like real life I feel.
The new input system coming is quite a major overhaul. Firstly when setting the config you will see the actual controllers now. You can even click the buttons/directions/etc on the devices to set them rather than clicking text.
Behind the scenes though some work has been done on migrating all input devices to common ports. Sega Master System and Sega Megadrive for instance have the exact same controller port. You can plug in a SMS pad into a megadrive and vice versa. Previously in RetroCopy I had separate 6 button Genesis controller "input" handling, one for SMS and one for Genesis. Only one demo on SMS uses the 6 button controller but I thought it was worthwhile adding support for it because homebrew developers should have that kind of flexibility!
But now any controller which uses the same port can be used on any system. How can this work? Well RetroCopy maps the emulated controller devices to the same hardware layout that exists in real life. Usually emulators don't bother with this level of detail as it's mostly irrelevant and offers no improvement to emulator accuracy. However it is cool when you have a multisystem emulator and want to plug in a variety of devices just like in real life. If you had the appropriate port on your PC RetroCopy could even talk to that device just like the real system. Kinda neat I think, especially considering most of us as kids surely took a Commodore 64 joystick or something similar and tried plugging it in to see if it would work!
Finally Tommy has created a facebook fan page that I have added to the blog part of the site here. If you're on facebook show us your support and become a fan! Tommy says he will be posting some more up to date information than I give (he is a beta tester) on there so keep an eye on it if I haven't written something for a few days.