I know its possible to have as many keyboards as you want on your USB ports, but does windows recognize them as one keyboard or as seperate ones? My point is that if you had two keyboards, W on keyboard 1 is forward W on keyboard 2 is switch to rocket launcher see what im saying? thanks, people
ok..... *sniff* i tried hooking two up and then typing in ms word, it didnt make a difference which one i typed in, mebe there a program or somehting
you have approximately 100 keys on your average keyboard you can use in a game, any chance of giving us a hint as to why you need twice that?
lol, i admit... so ya know in the matrix, on the Nebuchadnezzar, the operating deck? Where they have like 16 screens? well.... they also have 3 keyboards, and i was attempting to re-create something like that...
youd prolly be better off getting an MS natural keyboard (its already in 3 parts) and seperate out the two halves and the number pad into new enclosures, its one keyboard, probably end up being very usable and would look cool. remeber, it HAS to be black, or TBH your not gonna get let back on the boards throw in a nastromo or a thrustmaster tactical board as well and your cooking on gas (blowtorch?)
you've proved my point... how do those thing work?!?!?!? they're exactly like keyboards!!! there has to be a way...
I have a Nostromo (N45) that the owner of the company I work for got for me for X-Mas one year. Basicly, it is seen as an "HID Compliant" input device. The drivers from Belkin allow you to program what you want to each button. You could get clever, and try writing/hacking some drivers for a USB keyboard (good luck! ) so that it would not be "seen" as a keyboard. But I also think that some USB devices have PROMs that will "tell" Windows about the hardware (lookit me! I'm a keyboard with neat buttons at the top!) Jason A.
the problem with multiple keyboards (for windows based on NT at least) is that every piece of hardware goes via the kernel, so you can have 127 (or whatever USB's device limit is) keyboards all address the kernel, but it will mask it and pass to the application "w" irrelevant to which board generated the input. now gamepads work in a differnt way, because the computer assumes that each device is a seperate input source (it would be a bit silly if it treat 4 players gamepads as only player 1's) I think the best way may be to get something like a nostromo or tactical board and hax a physical keyboard layout onto them.
If you're really hardcore, you can do the following (all theoretically, there might be some flaws in my master plan): 1. Take a PIC and put it inside the keyboard. Connect it with the wires that go out and in from the keyboard, so that it can intercept every communication. 2. Connect a gamepad/serial port socket to a cable and connect the cable to some other lines on that very same PIC. Cut the original cable off the keyboard, you won't need it. 3. Program the PIC to be able to initialize the keyboard and parse messages sent from the keyboard (the keyboard sends these messages whenever a key is pressed/depressed). Make the PIC send special signals down the gamepad/serial cable whenever it receives a message from the keyboard so that the OS recognizes the PIC-keyboard combo as a functionning gamepad. That's actually quite possible probably. I might try this in the summer sometime. Just need to find out how the gameport works.
I would think the easiest way to do this (for gaming, at least) would be to see if there's a way for the game to distinguish between capital and lower case key presses. Then it would be a simple matter to keep caps lock enabled on one keyboard and disabled on the other.
lol, tell me this, what are you going to label these "new" keys on the second key board as? I mean, what do you want it to do in actuality. If you go into word and type on one and it works fine, what do you want to come up on the other one? You would have to assign all new meanings to each key, unless you have have it act like buttons on joystick... which would require you to prob. create new drivers... fun!
ummm, bear with me here, im dredging up some vague memory..... now, im not sure if this will work or not, but its an idea. i recall talking to a chinese girl online some time ago, who had three keyboards, so she could type in three different languages. im not sure if its possible, but try looking around in the hardware or language control panels or wherever, and seeing if you can set the second keyboard to a different language. you may be able to set both keyboards to a unique language, say keyb1 to UK english, and keyb2 to US english. or maybe different layouts. and then have windows see them as two unique keyboards. this is a bit of a stab in the dark, and i dont have a clue if it will work or not, but it might be worth a shot. if it does work, its an easy solution to the problem, and if it doesnt work, nothing lost. failing that, i have seen some drivers around for usb or serial devices, so you can build your own control pads for making a pc into an arcade game machine. i'll have a scoot around for them, you may just be able to have the keyboard use a custom driver and show itself to the pc as a 100+key gamepad. what do you actually want the other keyboards to do? i know you want a matrix-stylee setup, but like, do you want to type on the other keyboard? or just use them as "function buttons".
Good idea Zidane, perhaps try to put one keyboard in an asian alphabet, maybe that'll work if Zidanes solution doesn't, as the ASCII characters of the asian alphabet are differint than those of a normal alphabet. Or, just buy an asian keyboard. It looks more matrix-style and'll probably work.
So how did this turn out anyway? No fallow up? No one figured it out? Well i wanna know!!! Someone can figure this out...
