Weird issue with Tomb Raider on Dosbox

Libretro Cores
#1

So I’ve just been getting into the Dosbox core on Retroarch and I have Doom, Doom II and Quake running very nicely, even with CD audio for Quake. The next game I wanted to get working was the original Tomb Raider (on MS-DOS, obviously) and it’s now also working perfectly! Until I get game over. For some reason, as soon as Lara dies, the keyboard seems to no longer respond, within Dosbox. I can still use Scroll Lock for Game Focus Mode toggle and F1 for Menu Toggle, along with all other Retroarch hotkeys, but I can’t select Load Game or Exit To Title, within Tomb Raider, as the arrow keys and enter seem to no longer respond. It’s worth noting that I am playing in Keyboard+Mouse mode in Retroarch, not Gamepad mode. But if I pause the game, without dying, the arrow keys and enter function fine. This issue is not present in vanilla Dosbox.

For what it’s worth, I am playing on Linux, using the flatpak version of Retroarch, if that’s relevant somehow. Any help would be appreciated, as I’m stumped!

#10

So I worked out what’s going on with Tomb Raider. Kind of. Every time I had died so far had been from doing a swan dive off of a high ledge, as it’s a good way to kill Lara quickly. Just now, I let some wolves kill her to see if it would be any different and, what do you know, no frozen controls. It turns out that the combination of keys that are used to swan dive, CTRL, SHIFT and UP, seem to freeze some of the keys, at least ENTER, LEFT and RIGHT. If you press CTRL, SHIFT and UP again, those keys start responding.

The question is, why does this happen in the libretro core and not vanilla dosbox? Is it some kind of hotkey that I’m pressing? Thoughts anyone?

#11

Okay, so it seems the actual issue here is that the Retroarch front-end doesn’t capture the keyboard. In fullscreen, vanilla Dosbox captures the keyboard so that, when I press things like ALT+TAB or the WINDOWS/SUPER key, the host operating system/desktop environment doesn’t respond to them. In Retroarch, while I can use Game Focus Mode to stop Retroarch hotkeys from being activated, there isn’t anything I can do to stop my host OS from, say, opening the start menu or tabbing out. For example, jumping forward and shooting in Tomb Raider happens to be the same combination of keys that opens the Work Spaces Overview in the Cinnamon desktop environment, thus tabbing me out of the game. I think this is the root problem…

edited for clarity

#12

Added SDL 1.2 in https://github.com/flathub/org.libretro.RetroArch/pull/87 … Mind updating and re-trying?

#13

The SVN core works, now! Thank you! :smiley:

#14

Naturally the Tomb Raider problems are the same on the SVN core, as it’s really a Retroarch problem. I think the only solution for now would be for me to run Retroarch in KMS mode. Thanks for the help, guys! :slight_smile: