Hello! I was wondering if it is possible to built a quick responding 15-25 keys custom keyboard (lay the keys as needed) to control games (especially UT2004)? If so I appreciate any help avaible! Thanks in advance! p.s. I have an old keyboard laying around, is it possible to "cut" it, so it remains operational?
Two ideas come to mind. First hacking a kayboard is easy, it's a matrix. There's plenty of solder points, have fun Second, in the home arcade controls world we use keyboard encoders. www.ultimarc.com. The ipac or the minipac owuld be useful. Minipac isn't in the menu yet, just add on minipac.html. otherwise there was something called "The Grip" made for games. Or "The Claw", can't remember the name. I don't think it is made anymore but I saw one recently at a local store on clearence. You might be able to find that on ebay.
you can solder on clear plastic transfer sheet in a keyboard? me/ thinks not a company makes a boards with a removable face plate for gaming it has the button actions marked on it.........z- somthing comes to mind not sure if it will help
z-board. I don't know but I'm interested in doing it myself, albeit for a different reason (winamp control buttons under an LCD showing stats)
You could possibly super-ghetto it by mapping out where you want keys layed, popping out the corresponding buttons on the old keyboard, placing them in a convienient fashion in the middle of the board, and chopping off the rest of the un-needed bits. Of course, you'd have to remap your controls in your settings to what the keys actually are, and it would be ugly as sin... but it'd be smaller. ^_^
Probably not, but you could solder to the controller board itself and ditch the membrane totally. You can buy individual keyboard switches and caps from Rapid, then you can lay them out how you want and wire 'em all up Something Im going to try for my MP3/CD player project....
I have the original ZBoard and the Crossfire keyset, which is the generic keyset that is good for all games. The pros: Excellent movement keys, very ergonomic. For pure gaming it's excellent. Swapping keysets is easy and fast. The cons: Sometimes some of the movement buttons stick down, a sign of inconsistant build quality. A little modding could probably fix this though. HORRIBLE for typing. Now I don't expect to type an essay on it, but it's practically useless for chatting online. The only F keys are F5 and F9 for quick save and quick load. A huge gimp to me since I use a lot of F keys. There's a new Zboard out which looks like it's a huge improvement. For one, they went back to a more traditional QWERTY setup, but it's still not as good as it could be. There's an annoying gap that will make it hard to type with. I don't get why they can't just use an entire standard QWERTY set on the right two segments and use the left segment (of the folding board that is) for the gaming keys. I think they also have all the F keys, perhaps even more F keys than standard keyboards. Just incase you were wondering about it, anyway. Building your own is a better idea usually, as you get exactly what you want. But you may look at the design of the ZBoard for ideas.
