Are the 3 buttons a part of touch screen?

I have ben researching on java gameboy emulators that I could port.
While I was doing this, I was thinking how one would play dpad and the A/B button.
One idea I had was to use the screen as a dpad(move up/down/left/right), have start/select on bottom of screen, and for the A/B buttons, I was wondering if the 3 buttons on the bottom were usable.

If they are a part of the touchscreen, my idea is a failure.

Can anyone suggest ideas?

they're not part of the touch screen, they're physical buttons, I've haven't seen any statics or events to find a press on them.

even the interrupts (sprint.device.interrupt.*) in the com.sprintpcs.util.SystemEventListener don't give you notifications of the hard keys.

I haven't seen anything in the API or docs that give an app access those buttons, so not sure.

NO actually the 3 software buttons are part of the touch screen itslef, and the whole screen functions as whole, and for the dpad, in order to work on the instinct it would need to have a dpad installed into the game like on other touch screens.