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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Oh, wow, CGA graphics... makes me glad I had an Amiga at that time!

Anyway, looks like a nice game regardless, if only I could play it with my German keyboard :( Ok, I could contort my fingers and memorize the controls (EDIT: I tried, but "/" is Shift+7 on a German keyboard, and even if I press that, it doesn't work), but what's wrong with also supporting the arrow keys? I mean, all PCs had those, right?

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> what's wrong with also supporting the arrow keys? I mean, all PCs had those, right?

No, the arrow keys were introduced with the Model M keyboard in 1985. Before that only the numpad arrows were available and they were a bit awkward to use for gaming.

This game was released in 1984, so it makes sense that they weren't supported.

The C64 had arrow keys but as far as I remember they were never used as such.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/why-... has a few more examples of this kind of old-school variety of arrow keys.

It did indeed, they were sufficient (barely) for moving the cursor, but there were only two, iirc, default was right and down, and to go left and up, you had to press them while holding shift

You could try switching your keyboard to an English layout within your OS. That should do the trick even if it's still a little annoying.

On the first menu you can go into the game options and rebind the keys.

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