Monday, 22 November 2010

I wonder where I've seen that before...

Oh, wait, I know!

Rebinding AltGr to Alt in Windows

I've had enough with that AltGr key on my laptop. I've never used it, and I still vaguely understand who actually needs it. In any case, this blasted key does not work as the usual Meta key in Putty! You can't, say, use AltGr+b to jump a word back in Bash or Emacs. Several solutions of this outrage can be found on the Internet, the most popular one is to use the AutoHotKey utility and assign a dynamical rule to rebind that key to the normal Alt. That solution does appear to work for most of the time, however, there seems to be a better way. Instead of using a third-party program, we can use the facilities provided by Windows itself, namely, the Scancode Map key in the Windows registry. The problem above can be solved by adding the following information to the registry:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,38,00,38,e0,00,00,00,00
Basically, the only thing it does is that it makes the RAlt key (That is, Alt Gr) act exactly as the LAlt key. To make things work you just need to save the text above into a file with a .reg extention and double-click on it.

Additional information can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/w2kscan-map.mspx
Although the article was written for Win2k, the solution still works for WinXP and Windows 7. Still claiming Windows is user-friendly? :P.

Tuesday, 16 November 2010

No English text in Symphonic Rain

Note to self: don't forget to add (and probably modify first) SR.reg (located in the game's directory) to your registry before wondering why you cannot see any English text. Indeed, sometimes the issue may lie not in the "alternative" OS (works fine in Wine, woohoo!), but somewhere in between the keyboard and the chair.

P.S. The songs are charming and the game mechanics looks really fun, mind you, I've never played Guitar Hero or other rhytm games. The only one thing that's bothering me is that after 5 attempts I managed to get only 4 stars for the intro song. My years of piano practice went for nothing.