Mystery House with modern keyboards - bugs or features?

[GateKeeper]

I just played the first Hi-Res adventure, Mystery House, using the latest ScummVM release.

I suppose these issues have been known for a long time now, but I couldn't find any discussions or bug tracker reports about them. I am talking about modern keyboards being very different from the original Apple II keyboards which is causing some small, non-critical issues.

When the game asks to hit "any key" to exit the game, there are quite a few keys that don't work as any key. Arrow keys, shifts, controls, alts, home, delete, etc. don't work. Where it gets very confusing is that the normal enter key works, but numpad enter doesn't work. The numeric keys and operator keys on the numpad on the other hand, do work.

It gets even more confusing. All alphabets can be expected to work, and they do... unless the keyboard has non-English alphabets that go beyond a-z range which again don't work. But the very confusing thing is that those "extra alphabets" are accepted when naming saved games.


Another issue (very loosely keyboard-related) is that alt+S does take a screenshot, but there's a delay that prevents from getting a screenshot of timed events. There aren't many of those, but for example, trying to get a screenshot of the original title screen (the one that says On-Line Systems, not the one that says Sierra) seems to be impossible. Hitting alt+S does take a screenshot, but it's of the starting screen, not the title screen that only briefly flashes when starting the game. The same happens with death messages where there's first one line of text, and then another line. Trying to screenshot during the first line gets only a screenshot of the second line. And example of this is doing GO WINDOW in the attic, and then trying to get a screenshot of the line telling that you survived the fall is only going to produce a screenshot telling about the car crash.


So are all these known issues, or has no one bothered to report them either as a non-critical bug or a feature request? Or is the keyboard thing part of the keymapping work (GSoC and all that)? Or am I the only one who has encountered these things? And do I simply miss the correct timing with screenshots or is the delay real? Are all these something that should be reported, or something that should be just forgotten?
I guess people who play Mystery House know that there can be some issues with an old game like that, but especially keys working or not working can be confusing.