I'm reposting this in General because the game-specific forum gets very few posts - hope that's ok.

I want to remap movement from the arrow keys to the WASD keys in Betrayal at Krondor. I've never used Dosbox before and have no idea what I'm doing.

I launch the keymapper with Ctl+F1, and proceed to do the following:

Select left arrow key. Click Add. Select W. Click Save.
Repeat for the remaining arrow keys.
Exit keymapper.

But when I launch the game, the WASD keys do nothing. I'm guessing there are steps I'm missing. Am I supposed to leave DOSbox running when I click Play on GOG Galaxy to launch the game? Am I supposed to launch the game within Dosbox by typing oldschool DOS commands? I don't get it. Any of it.

Any help much appreciated!

Something like that occurred to me previously. I already tried unbinding everything from WASD before mapping them to the arrow keys, but that didn't work either.

Today I even tried unbinding everything from all keys the game uses (which should mean I can't use any controls in the game, right?) but when I launch the game, it just uses the default keys as normal. In other words, the game isn't recognising any changes I make to the key bindings in dosbox.

It seems very unlikely that this is a problem with dosbox or the game, and far more likely a problem with me doing something wrong. I just can't figure out what.

1)
CTRL-F1

2)
Click "key_up" in the mapper

3)
Click "Add"

4)
Type "w" on your keyboard (do not click the "w" in the mapper!)

5)
Click "Save"

The dosbox mapper file is probably not read when you launch the game. I'm not a galaxy user so I can't be of much help, but on my own dosbox, the mapper file is called mapper-0.74-3.map and is placed directly within the dosbox folder. Simply launching dosbox.exe reads it and takes its inputs.

I just checked my dosbox config file, and saw that in the [sdl] section, you may change the mapper file name.
Probably Galaxy must be configured to use a different config file than the default dosbox one. Find the good one and look at the mapperfile= line.Set it to the same name that the default dosbox config one and it should be good.

Esdf or ijkL are better than wasd.

First of all, you're right that the mapper file isn't being read when I launch the game through GOG.

I finally managed to launch the game through dosbox itself, in the same dos window that I used ctl+F1 to rebind the keys. (Launching the game this way was something of a chore in itself, because, having remapped WASD keys to the arrow keys, I couldn't type any commands that featured the letters W,A,S or D, as pressing those letters now just pushed the cursor left and right!) But when I finally managed to launch the game through dosbox, it now recognised the new key bindings. WASD movement worked!

However ... it ran extreeemely slowly, with lots of input lag, And the window was tiny.

So ideally I want to just get the GOG launcher to use the mapper file, as you've described. There's a dosbox config file in the Betrayal at Krondor folder, called GOGDOSConfig. Is that the one you mean? When I try to open it, I get an error telling me to open it from the start menu. It won't let me open it with notepad.

There's also a dosboxBAK file in the Betrayal at Krondor file which has the mapperfile line, but pointing that towards my edited map file (mapper-0.74) didn't seem to change anything.

When you went into the mapper by pressing ctrl-F1 to begin with, did you do it from inside the game after launching it from galaxy ?
Or did you open a separate dosbox prompt and then edit the controls ?

If it's the second case, what happens if you try the first instead ?

Oh wow. That's it. You've solved it. I didn't realise I could ctl+F1 while in-game. I was opening dosbox separately before launching the game each time. I just tried editing the keybindings from inside the game and it's working perfectly.

Thank you so much. I've been trying to play this for months. Now I can.

You're welcome.
Enjoy the game !




Despair thy eyes FTW !