Default Keyboard Controls on shmups

[Shatterhand]

I grow up playing on an MSX, so I played lots of Gradius (with choppy scroll, bla bla ), Aleste, Zanac, Space Manbow and so many other great games using an MSX keyboard.

Konami games had Space bar as button 1 and the M key as button 2. Most of the games had Space as button 1 and LGRAPH as button 2 (LGRAPH as at left of the space bar, pretty much were the Left Alt key is on modern PC keyboards)

I always wondered how come on PC games the standard for shmups became ZXC. I understand this came from Japan, but I don't remember other Japanese games having such configuration.

Do other shmups use a different default key? Would people like if if it was different? I remember when I begun playing on PC, the norm was using CTRL and ALT for fire buttons, even on older shmups like Tyrian, but with the adoption the Windows key, this configuration became really troublesone.

Does any shmup use, brr, the WASD config?

[PerishedFraud ឵឵]

zxc is used to prevent ghosting. modern keyboards tend to layer it so that wasd doesn't ghost, so using asd might be better. On old keyboards doing multi presses on asd, qwe, etc while also using arrow keys will result in input loss. zxc tends to not have those issues.

For games that lack key config or force terrible/outdated inputs like shift, alt, space - use UCR. (personal recommendation, and free. there's other programs for it too though).