Keys must be held for a frame to see them

What to know

2026-10-24, Wine 10 in the emulated PC, xdotool on Xvfb.

Symptom: xdotool type into the pilot-name box gave "TH" for "Truth", and a tapped Return did nothing.

Cause: the game reads the keyboard once a frame, through DirectInput, into the key table at 0x59a188 (a byte per key, bit 0 "pressed since read", bit 1 "down"; FUN_004abb78, FUN_004abbb0, observed). On the shared emulated PC the game ran at 6 to 11 frames a second (dt_ms 90-166, measured). xdotool's taps last about 12 ms, so most fall between two reads (inferred).

Fix: hold each key for at least two frames. Hardwar's vm_drive.sh holds keys 0.4 s by default, types one letter every 0.6 s, and holds mouse buttons 0.4 s.

For GameFrame: a general pitfall of driving a slow emulated game with synthetic input. The winput and xdotool recipes should hold keys for a few frames by default.