Rob now looks at an emulator with a difference. One which emulates a keyboard from your joystick/pad or mouse. Seems pointless, well take a look at the review and decide for yourselves...

Product: JoyEmu 4.1
Type: Joystick (or mouse) to Keypress converter
Get it from: www.emulationzone.org/projects/emutools
Written by: Simone Zanella Productions

Now this is a bloody handy piece of software. Have you bought a gamepad with more than four buttons for your PC and found that you can only use four of them with games or emulators? Or have you found that you can't redefine the buttons on your joystick/pad for your favourite game? This is the answer.

What it does is install a small memory resident program which traps all fire button presses and movements by the stick/pad and translates them into keypress signals. It also reads up to a fifteen button pad/stick (!) all of the buttons can be put into keypresses. Keys can be redefined using a configuration utility provided and various configurations can be saved. It'll even trap mouse movements and button presses and do autofire if you want!

One of the emulators used by myself quite often is the Amiga 500 emulator Fellow. Unfortunately, while it can use my gamepad, the fire button only works every second making shoot em ups a bit of a bind! No problem with the keyboard joystick emulation option though so JoyEmu was set up with the stick Axis pressing the cursor keys and the first fire button pressing right ctrl. I then realised that the game I wanted to play (Turrican) had addition weapons fired by other keys (SPACE, Amiga right and Enter) so I put these keys on the other fire buttons. Excellent.

Another example is Dark Forces. It only uses a four button pad and some of the buttons are strange. You have to hold B to duck and double tap it to jump. There is also a single key for strafe so I mapped the shoulder buttons to < and > (strafe left and right) and the others to the other keys for jump, duck, fire and run. Much better.

A slight niggle is that you have to start the TSR before Windows in the Autoexec. So if you don't need it it remains resident. There are hotkeys you can set to enable and disable it though. On my system the off rogue keypress crept in now and again. And it doesn't work with all PCs. However, if you despair about the control options in games or have more fire buttons than sense. Get this!

7/10 - Needs a bit more refining but is essential if you want total control over er... controls!