Greetings all,

I was a teenager when the Crusader games came out and played through them a ridiculous number of times. I was eager to give them another go but, lets me honest, the default controls are bloody awful! All I'm trying to do is "move" the controls from the cursors to a more common WASD setup. Should be easy as pie using DosBox's built in mapper function, right?

Wrong. The controls map ok, and I'm careful to remove the defaults from all keys I've used to avoid conflicts. More often than not, the keys then seem to be functioning ok in the game itself initially. However, within a minute or two things get all screwed up. Some keys stop responding properly if at all, some do things they shouldn't be doing, and I also seem to get "phantom" inputs from keys I'm not even pressing.

I haven't really used DosBox much before so I don't know if this is an issue common to emulator or whether it's specific to Crusader. Does anyone know what's going on and, more importantly, how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Strijkbout, I appreciate the response. :)

I already know about all of Crusader's different control methods. Admittedly I'd forgotten them over the years, but I'm an old-school gamer... I read the manual before playing yesterday! Unfortunately, I don't really get on with any of them. Without the mouse turning is far too slow, but with it you have to perform some horrible hand-gymnastics to be able to hit all the buttons you need.

That's why I started exploring the route of remapping the controls entirely. First I tried the DosBox mapper, and ran into the problems I've mentioned above. Then I tried a keyboard/mouse setup using Joystick Gremlin, but that failed because it sends the game both the key you've mapped and the key you're actually pressing... that makes WASD impossible.

Finally, I tried a joypad setup also using Joystick Gremlin. This seemed to work great at first, the only slight issue being that if you run, then turn while running, the Silencer stops running after facing the new direction. I don't know why this happens and couldn't find a fix, though I could live with it if it means being able to play.

However, getting my joypad working revealed that the problem I described in my OP is in fact nothing to do with the mapper at all. No matter what controls I'm using, even the defaults, the issues described start happening within a couple of minutes... keys delayed or not responding, and "phantom" inputs causing the Silencer to roll/run/sidestep when I'm not even holding a modifier key.

So long story short, even using one of the default control methods, I still cannot play the game due to this issue. And if it's not the mapper causing it, then I have even less idea of what is the problem. Does anyone have any ideas?


EDIT: I've marked this thread solved since it isn't the mapper causing the issue, and I've started another thread with a better title/description.