DirectInput8 buffered mode

Unfortunately, DirectInput just treats the keyboard as a "102 button joypad" - it just tells you which buttons are pressed without combining them in the usual ways (like shift + 2 = "). I suppose you could monitor the shift keys yourself and combine inputs as appropriate. The problem is that although you can find out the localised key name, you have no way of knowing what characters should be produced for given combinations. For instance, pressing shift + 3 produces a £ on a UK keyboard, but on a US keyboard it produces a # (I think). That''s before you get into languages with accents (where "dead keys" are used).

This means you will either have to hardcode the keymap (which is very annoying if the keymap and keyboard don''t match) or find some way to interface with win32 keymapping to get the information you need from there. The other option, which you have already mentioned, is to find some way to route WM_CHAR or WM_KEYUP/DOWN into your input module. Not particularly the way I want to do things either, but that''s probably the best way to handle it at the moment.

I think there was supposed to be an updated version of DirectInput in which would help solve these sorts of problems, but it hasn''t showed up in DX9. Here''s hoping they finish it for DX10 .

well either you maintain a map yourself or use something like

short Ascii(uint scancode)
{
ushort ch;
int ret;

// keys is the 256 byte array that you pass to GetDeviceState, scancode is equivalent to DIK_* values

ret = ::ToAscii(MapVirtualKey(scancode, 1), scancode, keys, (LPWORD)&ch, 0);
if(ret > 1)
return ch;
else if (ret == 1)
return ch & 0xff;

return ret ? 0:scancode;
}