Original Exile not responding to numpad movement

[promethean]

The "Help" within the original Exile game states that movement can be either with a mouse or with the number pad, e.g., 4 moves left, 5 pauses, 6 moves right, 2 is up and 8 is down.

 

However, with or without numlock on, no matter what I do Exile is responding as if I had hit one of the arrow keys rather than move the player character. I even tried hard-coding with a keyboard key mapper, and I experienced the same.

 

Is the in-game help wrong, or am I missing something?

 

Thanks for any help.

[Slawbug]

Keypad movement definitely works in Exile. The only thing I can imagine is that your keypad keys are being mapped to arrow keys in some way that you can't influence. Do your keypad keys type numbers when you use them in a text editor?

[promethean]

Thanks for confirming that it is a working feature. There seems to be something about the dosbox implementation I'm using that's stopping the numpad form working, or numlock. Is there a file in Exile that can be changed to remap what keys it will respond to for movement?

[Slawbug]

Yeah, using DOSBox definitely has the potential to do this. I think DOSBox might have a Num Lock function that is NOT accessed by pressing Num Lock on your keyboard.

 

Any changes you make to this will need to be done through DOSBox and not through Exile. It's a shareware Mac game from 1994; it doesn't have any kind of keymap function.

[Harehunter]

DOSBOX is very particular about focusing on the proper window. I just fired up my DOSBOX load, started Window 3.1, launched Exile. When I tried the numeric keypad to move aroung, ...nothing... Then I clicked on the DOSBOX window itself, tried again and, voila!, it works.

 

Just remember, for DOSBOX to work properly, regardless the program, you have to click the mouse into the DOSBox screen itself. Note that Alt-TAB will not take you to an application outside of DOSBox; you must move the mouse pointer outside of DOSBox, and click back into the OS environment.

 

Edit:

Correction; you have to click on the Exile application within the Windows application. In short, you are dealing with another layer of environment; the OS, the DOSBox, the Win3.1, the Exile. Each level of environment, while spawned from the parent and shares only what the parent process passes down, is a separate entity of its own.

[Milon]

I've ran into this issue myself. I find that once DosBox is running, I just need to turn Num Lock off then on and it'll work fine. Hope that helps!