I intend to play elemental by plugging my netbook in my TV. Everything work great so far: I have the cables and the cooling pad. The only problem so far is the mouse.
I looked for handheld trackball. The problem is that there is really few models and they are not available in stores. So I need to order online and cannot test them before buying. I bought recently the fish hand held trackball and it sucks. Most of the time when I spin the ball, there is no reaction at all even if it is a laser mouse. So I was thinking of looking for another handheld trackball.
Now what if Elemental could have other interface, like the keyboard or the joystick. Personally, I would implement a keyboard only interface and I would use the JoyKey emulator to map the joystick on the keyboard. So that there will only be a need to create a keyboard interface that could be useable with a joystick as well is there is not too much keys used.
Still, you might say that it is impossible to do? Well, there is an old Koei game called PTO 2 that was converted from mouse to gamepad when it got ported on SNES. The concept was simple:
There was various interface to communicate with:
A-The menu at the top of the screen
B- The map where you could move a cursor
C- The list of fleets and units you could view.
When you push a certain button, you switched between each of these interface. So for example, at the beginning you were in the menu. If you wanted to see the units, to push the button and it switch to the unit list. Then if yo push the same button again, it switched to the map and another time it switched back to the menu.
Once you get used to it, it's not so hard to use. Try PTO 2 if you want to test it for real.
What Do you think?
Else, do you think it could be achieved with modding?
