Cheap Shift button idea for keyboard hacks

[Chris]

I just had a nifty idea for a Shift button...

For a keyboard hack, ordinarily you woul pick one row of the matrix and use that as the commond ground for each button, and wire the other terminal of each button to a separate column in the matrix.  

To make a Shift button, then, you should be able to run this common wire to the common terminal of a Shift button.  You would then connect the NC terminal to the matrix row you wanted to use and the NO to an alternate row.  Then, when the Shift button was held down, each button would generate a different keycode than normal!

Is there any reason this shouldn't work?

--Chris

[eightbit]

Wow, that seems so simple that you would think it had been tried before and that there would be a reason for it to not work.

It gives me a headache trying to visuliaze the wiring though...

[neuromancer]

I just had a nifty idea for a Shift button...

For a keyboard hack, ordinarily you woul pick one row of the matrix and use that as the commond ground for each button,
Is there any reason this shouldn't work?

--Chris

That would be for a limited control panel, I suppose.

For a 2 stick x 6 button panel, you need to double up on the joysticks (left-right & up-down share columns), and then all the maintenance functions need to share with other already used columns too.

If your matrix had 16 columns (like most do), then if you had 12 player buttons, you would only have 4 open columns, which would be exactly enough for the joysticks, *except* that one of the columns usually only has the two shift keys on the keyboard, and most of the rows have one or more holes in them.

If you were a little careful, you could probably make it work with one players buttons, as long as you were careful to not enable any windows "special" combinations (if you use windows).

Of course if you're using MAME, then you can use *any* key as a shift key already, because they built that into the program.

Bob