How do you split a keyboard for 2 person play?

[Pixel_Outlaw]

What is the ideal way to map a keyboard shared by two shmup players?
I'm working on a pet project that will have very simple 8 way movement + 2 buttons per player.

Just curious what people think is reasonable. (Yes I'll handle joysticks and controllers too).
Did Raiden DOS have 2 player keyboard control?

Thanks for suggestions!

[WelshMegalodon]

A keyboard isn't an ideal solution in the first place, but I've always used WSAD + G and H for Player 1 and the numeric keypad for Player 2. A mechanical keyboard will yield the best results, as I'm sure you already know.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

A keyboard isn't an ideal solution in the first place, but I've always used WSAD + G and H for Player 1 and the numeric keypad for Player 2. A mechanical keyboard will yield the best results, as I'm sure you already know.

I've got a *very* full sized 122 key Model M terminal.
Thanks for the mapping idea. Yes, I know it's not ideal to use 1 keyboard.
Problem is a lot of my friends are /PC masterrace/ and don't even use a joystick for their fpswhatever games so they have none.

[null1024]

like a decade ago [it might actually be a literal decade ago now], my buddies and I played a bunch of 4-player Smash 64 on my terrible 2001-era laptop with a USB keyboard attached [and of course, pretty much nothing that wasn't MAME actually read each keyboard individually, so it was like all four of us were on the same keyboard, and I'm not even sure if MAME supported proper multi-input at the time now that I think about it], two players per keyboard, and I pretty much just mapped as few buttons as I possibly could
It's an extreme example, but it pretty much exemplifies the fact that sharing a keyboard is absolutely awful. Both keyboards ghosted differently, so any single default setup will fail for a fair few people.
There's nothing quite as dumb as realizing that you died just because you were hitting up+left while your opponent was doing down+a or whatever and your left input got dropped. Keyboards that don't suck solve this problem, but that's not likely.

If you're going to have multiplayer on keyboard, you'll want to set it up so that you can quickly just click which player's action is mapped to what button, press the key, and then once that's done, have an input test screen so the player can check all the different combinations of keys and make sure both players can move and shoot and whatever at the same time.

there's also the issue that any keyboard hooked up via USB will accept at most 4 modifier keys and 6 standard keys at the same time, period [all keys can be pressed at once over PS/2, but nearly no one is going to be hooked up over PS/2 or have a proper keyboard that'll let that happen], so if both players need to press both attack buttons at the same time and move diagonally, you've got problems unless you map another button to do that [and then you have the issue of figuring out yet another key that won't ghost while both players are moving]
All laptop keyboards will probably have an issue [and they might even be hooked up as USB devices internally].

If they've got a high end gamer keyboard or a proper mechanical keyboard plugged in over PS/2, there's no worry at all. All other keyboard options will have problems with sharing, unless you plug in a literal second keyboard.

Really, it's actually a perfectly reasonable expectation that players will have at least one controller of some sort that can plug into their PC if they intend to do local multiplayer.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

If they've got a high end gamer keyboard or a proper mechanical keyboard plugged in over PS/2, there's no worry at all. All other keyboard options will have problems with sharing, unless you plug in a literal second keyboard.

Really, it's actually a perfectly reasonable expectation that players will have at least one controller of some sort that can plug into their PC if they intend to do local multiplayer.

I totally forgot about the issue with keys blocking other keys. Scrapping the 2p keyboard idea.