Casualties of war...

[Airbozo]

A new blog entry has been added:

[drupal=41]Casualties of war...[/drupal]

OK I did not post this in the tech section because I really don't need help. I am just commiserating on the death of my Z-board...

Last night while sneaking around in BF2 Special Forces Ghost town, playing as an anti tank soldier, I had just used the grappling hook to get me and my sniper to a good perch. There were already a few baddies up there who did not see/hear us coming. Snuck up behind one of them and took him out with a knife, my sniper partner did the same with the other guy, just as another squad member spawned on him, the surprise of it all made me jump up and start firing, while avoiding his attempts to slay me, I was hammering the keys, got off an anti tank round right at the baddies feet! In my excitement I did not realize that the "strafe right" button on my BF2 special keyset (a freebie, oh so long ago), stopped working. I kept trying to move right, but no go. BF2 was done with me for the night.


Tore apart the keyboard this morning and found a couple of burned traces on the plastic membrane. Guess it's time for a new keyboard.

[Prettyugly]

HeyHey, Prettyugly from long Beach Here, You may know me

I have tried/bought/abused/destroyed all of the major brands of keyboards, I am going to bite the bullet and get a Deck keyboard (no, i am not a rep,lol).

They have characters that will not wear out (like my logitech) they have individual led's for each key, and best of all, they use cherry kvm switches rather than the membrane-type of input...they have tactile switches available on some of the models, as well. (think old IBM KB feel)

Oh, for folx like us that tear things apart, their warranty actually approves modifications.

(i really hate the Razer Lycosa i am using now-if you accidentally shut the lights off, you will die in game, trying to find the switch in the dark)

Woot.

Rae

[Airbozo]

Welcome Rae!

Normally I would give you grief for resurrecting such and old thread. Not this time as I am glad you posted. It's been a long time my friend and I miss you. I sent you a PM and an email. Lets get together when you come up to norcal!

[Konrad]

Sorry to read about your ZBoard dying (26 months ago) ...

I've always thought those things just look flimsy, somehow, no matter how cool they are.

Would you ever buy another?

[Airbozo]

Sorry to read about your ZBoard dying (26 months ago) ...

I've always thought those things just look flimsy, somehow, no matter how cool they are.

Would you ever buy another?

I wouldn't buy it again. No real need. I too was worried about the sturdiness of those keyboards and was really only surprised it lasted so long since I am very abusive to my keyboards.

I now have the Merc Stealth and so far after owning it for over 2 years my only complaint is the numbers wearing off of the gaming pad...

[x88x]

my only complaint is the numbers wearing off of the gaming pad...

See? You should have bought an Optimus Maximus.

Seriously though, I would never buy one...they apparently feel like typing on flat legos.

[Konrad]

lmao, I held on to my Merc Stealth for 29 days before finally returning it.

I tried - I really did try - to get used to it. I was torn after using it for just an hour, and found myself torn over all the same issues (plus a few more) after a month of forced use. I almost kept it, but it occurred to me that I could always just buy one again.

Quality is awesome, it's a panzer, heavy, solid, immovable, and built to laugh at abuse. The inside of the Merc is all high quality construction and materials throughout (and an unspectacular Holtek keyboard controller mounted on the thickest PCBs I've ever seen). The backlighting is awesome, better overall illumination than any Razer or Logitech keyboard I've ever seen, it would be nice if it offered more colours, but that's unimportant. The gamepad rocks (duh, that's what it's for) after you get used to it. The "anti-ghosting" is not as great as advertised but still plenty sufficient. It's even got big backspace and backslash keys, my personal preference since I do a lot of programming. I'm (almost) one of those elitist "Model M or Death" sorts of typists, I'm very particular about my keyboard layout and keyswitches and such ... I found the Merc Stealth had good tactile response and was comfortable to use, plus it was (except for the spacebar) nearly silent.

I found that constantly tapping NumLock was a minor annoyance, though an acceptable/expected one that I could overcome. The Ins+Del keys being shifted one row down from the Home+End+PgUp+PgDn keys they're normally associated with just drove me batty from the first to the last minute I owned it. Similarly, on the gamepad, I eventually thought that having the numbers arranged as a 1-5 row then a 6-11 row would've been more intuitive. It would make an easier transition from WASD, where you would expect (for example) 123 to be located above and slightly to the left of QWE ... and 5 is somehow a more natural grouping than 6 ... even after a month I kept hitting the wrong numbers unless I looked first - a very bad design detail, I think. I wasn't very impressed by the over-hyped Z-Engine software, though it did it's job well enough and isn't excessively bloaty. I wasn't impressed at all that the software wouldn't allow some keys to be remapped, all the worse because some are preconfigured to hotlaunch now-extinct Ideazon websites. Achieving any kind of "lockout" configuration to prevent hotkeys from unintentionally launching Windows services was ultimately impossible. Worse, the keyboard is brainless and entirely dependant on Z-Engine software ... settings for keys/macros/profiles require Z-Engine (and Windows) to be running. There is no software control to adjust or "remember" backlight settings, a trivial but immediately obvious limitation (and a strange one, since the backlight keys generate keyscan codes).

Even having said all that ... I still think I'll buy one again. As it turns out I'm currently building my own keyboard controller ... the Merc is definitely mod-worthy hardware to put it into. Improved backlighting (that is, "more colours" since it cannot otherwise be much improved) is easy ... Ins/Del keys could be easily repositioned ... the only deficiency that would require large effort to overcome are the oddball number keys on the gamepad (6+5 instead of what I think would be a much better 5+6 arrangement). Still thinking about it.

If SteelSeries/Ideazon correct the worst of these minor issues in a newer version ("Merc Blitz" maybe?) then I'll be the first person in line to buy one. It seems unlikely, the Merc series is sort of a dead-end, since they've had so much success with the ZBoards.