Read the keyboard from the X keymap, not from SDL's private X11_KeyToUnicode - #90

The problem

x86UNIXInputManager.cc declared extern "C" Uint16 X11_KeyToUnicode(SDLKey, SDLMod) and called it three times per key to fill AsciiTable with the unshifted, shifted and AltGr character for every key. That function belongs to SDL 1.2's X11 driver, appears in no public header, and linked only because SDL 1.2 was built without symbol visibility control.

Distributions no longer ship that SDL — what they package as SDL 1.2 is sdl12-compat, a shim over SDL2/3. The interesting part is that it does not fail to link: it exports an X11_KeyToUnicode of its own, and that one is a US-layout toupper() stub. Measured against a hand-built genuine SDL 1.2, same machine, same us layout:

So building against a distribution package linked cleanly and then mistyped every shifted punctuation character — a worse failure than a missing symbol, because nothing announces it.

The change

The ascii table is now read from the X keymap through public Xlib, which is where SDL was reading it from anyway. SDLKeyToXKeySym names the X keysym for each SDL keysym, and XLookupString against a synthetic XKeyEvent asks the server what that key types with no modifier, with ShiftMask, and with Mod5Mask for AltGr. The display comes from the existing DisplayPtrManager, so it also works when SDL has not stored one, and a missing display now warns instead of silently zeroing the table.

Deliberately not the approach the Emscripten back-end takes (a hardcoded printable-ASCII filter plus a US-QWERTY shift switch) — that is right for a browser canvas and would regress every non-US keyboard on desktop Linux.

A trap worth recording

The keypad entries name the numlock-off keysyms (XK_KP_Delete, XK_KP_Insert, …) rather than XK_KP_Decimal and XK_KP_0. A keyboard binds both spellings and XKeysymToKeycode resolves them to different keycodes — XK_KP_Decimal landed on a separate layout-defined separator key (129) instead of the physical numpad period (91). The numlock-off spelling is what SDL 1.2 effectively resolved to, and this was the single mismatch until it was fixed.

A second, unrelated wall

Fixing the link exposed one. InitSDL takes the engine's Display, screen and locking out of SDL_GetWMInfo's x11 union, and sdl12-compat picks the Wayland video driver on a Wayland desktop, where that call answers "No SysWM support available". The engine stopped at "Unable to initialize SDL" before it ever reached a keymap. It now asks for SDL's x11 driver with a non-overriding setenv and runs through Xwayland; an explicit SDL_VIDEODRIVER still wins.

Verification

Ran the identical translation code beside genuine SDL 1.2 over all 113 keys InitKeyMaps maps:

• us layout — 0 differences.
• de layout — unshifted and shifted rows also identical; the AltGr row now holds what AltGr actually produces (AltGr-q is @) instead of repeating the unshifted character. That is the one intended behaviour change, and it is what the "goofy (i18n) case" exists for.

On Arch against sdl12-compat 1.2.68, with no vendored SDL in the configure:

• readelf -d reports no RUNPATH at all (previously a path into a gitignored build/deps/sdl12, which git clean -xdf would have broken).
• nm -u shows X11_KeyToUnicode is not referenced.
• The editor boots, loads PlanetX, and typing ! : ? _ " ( into the in-engine console produces exactly those characters — where the stub would have produced 1 ; / - ' 9.

An A/B against a pre-change build on genuine SDL 1.2, under identical synthetic input, was indistinguishable.

Also here

• Deleted the vestigial X11_KeyToUnicode extern in EmscriptenInputManager.cpp, which nothing called.
• Dropped the ubuntu-22.04 pin on the linux-x64 CI job, which existed only for this. This is the one thing only CI can confirm — 24.04's libsdl1.2-dev resolves through a transitional package name, which I could not verify locally. The 32-bit job keeps its pin, but re-labelled for the :i386 dev packages, which is the reason that still actually applies.
• CMakeLists.txt, cmake/BUILD-PLATFORM-NOTES.md and build-linux.sh all claimed the shim lacks the symbol. Measurement says that is not what goes wrong, so they now say what does.
• Two CHANGELOG.md entries under the unreleased section.

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