Posted by Ray Ghanbari on July 18, 1999 at 16:42:28:
Folks,
Has anyone tried to connect multiple USB keyboards to a PC via a USB hub?
My guess/hope is that the Windows keyboard driver will read from all of them, meaning that you can strip two keyboards for their encoders (player 1 &2 on keyboard 1, players 3 & 4 on keyborad 2) and avoid ghosting, and use a third keyboard as a keyboard, all without a splitter.
USB peripherals are pretty damn cheap (~$12 for a keyboard at buy.com), with the notable exception of USB hubs.
However, the same approach could allow multiple joysticks as well.
Thoughts before I blow $$/time to figure this stuff out?
Looking forward, the USB microcontrollers are pretty damn cheap and flexible. If programmability is not an issue, should be possible to hack a USB "keyboard" interface with ~20-30 dedicated input lines for <$20.
If anyone has experiences with USB and PC emulation (good or bad), please post. It would be great to leverage other people's experiences on this project.
Ray