Help with keyboard and old game

[Lord Relvenous]

So nostalgia got the better of me and I'm returning to Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries. It was always one of my favorite Mechwarrior games, and it's been a while since I've played it. I've run up against a problem, though. The keyboard that I am using is a newer one with multi-purpose function keys (save, close, open, etc.). When I play, many of these keys are not recognized as function keys, instead not registering at all, or be read as "y", "o", "n", or oddly enough a different function key. I've tried remapping the keys to different keys, but it didn't change anything (even though Q was mapped to Teammate 1, F1 would order Teammate 1). Also, when I used F Lock, the keys would register as the correct keys when mapping them, but then go back to the old problem during play.

Has anyone encountered a problem like this? How did you fix it? I thought I had the solution with F lock, but the problem remained. Do I just need an older keyboard? Thanks!

[Stark]

You're on a laptop, right?

Buy a USB keyboard.

[Executor32]

Actually, I'm pretty sure he has a Microsoft Natural 4000, since it's a newer keyboard with all those retarded function keys. I think the only real solution is to get a different keyboard without retarded function keys, or possibly uninstall the keyboard drivers, if it uses its own special ones.

[Lord Relvenous]

Yep, Executor. Natural 4000. The thing is annoying as hell. Anyways, a combination of running old drivers of a keyboard without weird keys and reinstalling the game's patches seem to have taken care of the problem.

[Stark]

I hope you've learned your lesson and will avoid such retarded gimmickboards in future. Any keyboard that needs drivers sucks.

[Batman]

I'm on a Microsoft Digital Media Keyboard 3000, and while I agree the plethora of additional buttons is essentially useless (call me old-fashioned, but I like for the key in the upper-left corner of they keyboard to be ESC, not some stupid email key I'll never use) I've never had any problems with MW4:Mercs.
You should be able to just reassign functions to traditional keyboard, well, keys, though. I mean why would all those additional keys matter if you assign, say, 'Fire Group One' to 'Q' for example?

[Lord Relvenous]

I hope you've learned your lesson and will avoid such retarded gimmickboards in future. Any keyboard that needs drivers sucks.

Oh trust me, I hate the damn thing. However, it's not my keyboard. I'm at my parents' house for the next week and a half and I found my old MW4:M disc. As I don't have a laptop (last one died a little while ago and I post from my phone) I figured I might as well play it while I could.

And Batman, I think my inability to successfully rebind the order keys was due to a corrupted patch. I tried reassigning all the teammate keys across the top row, but it was still using the defaults.

Anyways problem solved.

[Stark]

My parents do the same thing; they've been through half a dozen mouse + keyboard gimmick sets in the last five years.