PoFV two-player controls

[commandercool]

Is there a way for two people to play Phantasmagoria Of Flower View on the same machine with two different keyboards outside of the split-keyboard controls? I have a laptop and a USB keyboard, and have not been able to figure out how to get the game to register the USB keyboard as a distinct entity from the built-in keyboard, so both sets of arrow keys end up controlling the same character. Is there a way within the game or with external software to let both players play comfortably without two computers?

For the time being we've been using my arcade stick, which the game has no trouble recognizing as a separate piece of hardware and runs with no problems at all aside from being very poorly suited to this sort of game. I'm probably overlooking something simple but I can't figure this out, so any solutions would be appreciated.

[Zil]

The problem with split keyboard controls is that the keys the game expects you to use are in stupid positions right? I don't know if this works, but what I can think of trying would be remapping the keys (with a program like keymapper or whatever) to something more usable. As long as both keyboards are using different buttons I think it should work.

[commandercool]

That would be less preferable than using standard controls on two separate keyboards since it still requires someone to do something they're not used to, but yeah, it would be way better than the bizarre keys the standard two-player settings use. I haven't tried it yet, but I suppose I will unless something better comes along.

[commandercool]

I've done a little bit more experimenting with this in the last few weeks. Keymapping to controllers has generally been a failure for various reasons, but the game seems to recognize official Microsoft Xbox controllers with no trouble. I don't know why anyone would want to do that, but a couple of the people I play with prefer them apparently. Still haven't worked too hard on getting two keyboards going, but I technically have more information now than I did. I don't know why using external software to map to non-Microsoft controllers doesn't work, but it doesn't well. Xbox controllers do work.