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Keyboard Ghosting Explained
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#82In the high school computer lab, after I showed my friends how to disconnect from the Novell network so our instructor couldn't watch what we were doing, we used to play a very good Street Fighter 2 clone. I quickly learned all about keyboard ghosting and used it to my advantage to block my opponent from blocking my attacks. When I tried the same tactic on my computer at home, I discovered it didn't have the same pro…
Wait Novell Netware still has that bug? I recall in my A levels day, we would disconnect the LAN cable on a Netware client machine to circumvent having to logon to the network, which gave us control of the local machine.
It did 20 years ago...
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#83I am always amazed that keyboards still do this. We have scanning matrices because back when I was a new engineer pins on a microprocessor were both expensive (larger packages) and they required more gates in the CPU (more expensive CPU) or chip doing the scanning. Today transistors are free and surface mount BGA packages can put down a lot of pads pretty simply[1]. So your typical 104 key keyboard could actually hav…
A serial bus of unique identifier switches (1wire or similar) connecting all the keys with a single loop could be cheaper at scale and solve NKRO. Possibly work on many vastly different (a few buttons to hundreds) product lines with the same ASIC with say only one or two support components per application.
You are correct, that is an nicely elegant solution. You could even use the top of a 'key' chip as the land point for the key, either magnetic or capacitive activation.
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#84Microsoft make some of the best keyboards there are. Just did some tests on my Sidewinder keyboard, no issue at all there.
It's easy to take good hardware design for granted. Suddenly that Das Keyboard I've been eyeing doesn't look so expensive...
I picked up a Max Keyboard Blackbird during a recent sale. It's the only tenkeyless mechanical keyboard I could find with a built-in USB hub. The backlight is a nice bonus.
The keyboard defaults to 6KRO. When I set it to NKRO (over USB), the OS X keyboard viewer showed as many keys as I could hold down. However, it no longer recognized the Caps Lock key as Control, as mapped in the System Preferences.
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I'm using a Das Keyboard, and can only get six keys at a time on their applet. One way some people get around this is by using PS/2.
I use a Noppo Choc Mini and it does n-key rollover over USB. It works well but the numpad function won't work on linux for some reason. I also heard it makes the keyboard not function with certain BIOS/operating systems. Quite frankly I really don't care for n-key rollover, it's a silly marketing argument as far as I'm concerned. 6 KRO without ghosting "ought to be enough for anybody", especially if the alternative b…
Yeah, my primary reason for getting the Das was to play Starcraft. I've never felt like I have too few keys at a time (but maybe that's because i'm not enough of a hardcore bonjwa).
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is funny because the first keyboard I had, back in the 386 days (1992 I think), didn't had this problem. I remember playing two player games on it without any "ghosting". The keyboard was very solid - hard plastic keys and metal backplate. It was nearly indestructible. Even though new keyboards appeared over time, we still used this one for about 12 years, particularly because that all new keyboards had this gho…
The main issue is cost, as always; the keyboards from that era (IBM Model M and such) cost $100-$150 at the time, which would be even more nowadays. The hardware in those was much more as you'd expect it to be. The technique described in this article is much simpler to make, requires no soldering, etc. You can splurge on a more expensive keyboard (I have a Filco Majestouch at home) that don't use this cheap techinque…
I've been looking for the Majestouch NINJA [BrownSwitch/Fullsize/US ASCII] (1). If I find one, I hope I can get the proposal past my minister of finance.
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#87I am always amazed that keyboards still do this. We have scanning matrices because back when I was a new engineer pins on a microprocessor were both expensive (larger packages) and they required more gates in the CPU (more expensive CPU) or chip doing the scanning. Today transistors are free and surface mount BGA packages can put down a lot of pads pretty simply[1]. So your typical 104 key keyboard could actually hav…
Well $8 for a chip is extremely expensive. I bet a vast majority of keyboards on the market sell in bulk for less than $8.
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#88In the high school computer lab, after I showed my friends how to disconnect from the Novell network so our instructor couldn't watch what we were doing, we used to play a very good Street Fighter 2 clone. I quickly learned all about keyboard ghosting and used it to my advantage to block my opponent from blocking my attacks. When I tried the same tactic on my computer at home, I discovered it didn't have the same pro…
Just wondering, was that SF2 clone Super Fighter, with Pho Huang among the characters? I did the same thing about figuring out which keys would block my opponent from moving, both in Super Fighter and in the PC ports of the Mortal Kombat games. Didn't go as far as automatically calculating it per keyboard, though. We actually tried to play honestly without using that for advantage, a gentleman's agreement to only pre…
Eventually we decided it was cheating too and called a truce to key smashing. That wouldn't prevent us to use it on occasion as a last ditch effort. ;-)
It's been a few years, so I don't remember too much about the game. I only remember it was such a good port that I could learn moves on the clone and that made me a much better player in the arcades.
I also played my share of Mortal Kombat and Doom on those desktops. Mortal Kombat was great because it was actually a port by Probe/Acclaim and as far as I could tell it played identically. That became a valuable skill in college.
Probably my favorite misuse of equipment was from my senior year of high school. I got myself a 486 DX2-50 monochrome laptop and my friend got a Toshiba color laptop. We hooked up Null MODEM cables and strung them out over a couple seat rows and columns. We played Doom death matches in the middle of class lectures.
Having a laptop was unusual. Using one in a classroom, even more so. I don't know if our government teacher thought we were taking notes -- we weren't -- but I don't think he suspected we were playing multiplayer games. Besides, collectively my friends and I had the best grades in the class, so as long as we weren't being disruptive we could pretty much do as we pleased. We were still the only ones who would answer any questions or engage in political debate.
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an expert either, but afaik it's not a speed issue, just an issue of compatibility with USB's standard driver-spec-thingy for keyboards: its authors decided that six keys (plus modifiers, iirc) should be enough for anybody, right?
Page 59 of the USB HID Spec [1] is the offender, it states: The following table represents the keyboard input report (8 bytes). Byte Description 0 Modifier keys 1 Reserved 2 Keycode 1 3 Keycode 2 4 Keycode 3 5 Keycode 4 6 Keycode 5 7 Keycode 6 Which is where the 6 key roll over comes from. However this is really the minimum implementation so that BIOS'es can use USB keyboards. If you read the spec carefully there isn…
Thank you. So the issue is that Das can't be bothered with coding and maintaining custom drivers for every OS under the sun. I guess that's fair.
Also, I've never actually run into a problem using it over USB on a Mac or PC, so I guess it can't be that bad! (I do play games, but this keyboard goes on my work machine in whichever office that is.)
Re: Keyboard Ghosting Explained
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Page 59 of the USB HID Spec [1] is the offender, it states: The following table represents the keyboard input report (8 bytes). Byte Description 0 Modifier keys 1 Reserved 2 Keycode 1 3 Keycode 2 4 Keycode 3 5 Keycode 4 6 Keycode 5 7 Keycode 6 Which is where the 6 key roll over comes from. However this is really the minimum implementation so that BIOS'es can use USB keyboards. If you read the spec carefully there isn…
Thank you. So the issue is that Das can't be bothered with coding and maintaining custom drivers for every OS under the sun. I guess that's fair. Also, I've never actually run into a problem using it over USB on a Mac or PC, so I guess it can't be that bad! (I do play games, but this keyboard goes on my work machine in whichever office that is.)
You don't even need to code custom drivers though, you can just present the keyboard as multiple keyboard devices to the host.