Microsoft Hardware Blog

Imagine you’re on your PC, playing your favorite racing game. You are roaring past your opponents, and your favorite ride is hugging every twist and turn of the road to perfection. You swing left and right as the scenery whizzes past. Suddenly you realize that you’re taking that tight curve a little too fast. You stomp on the brake, but nothing happens, and soon you are pounded against the guard rail.

When this sort of thing happens in a game, most people assume that they messed up. Maybe I hit the brakes too late. They worked fine every other time I used them. So it must be me.

Little do they suspect that the real culprit just might be their keyboard.

How could that be? The dirty little secret is that most keyboards have a virtually fatal flaw: some combinations of keys simply do not work!

So just how bad is the keyboard problem? The most cost effective way to build a keyboard is to place the switches on a grid of wires. It is easy to show that if this is done in the obvious manner, you end up with about 10,000 different sets of 3-keys that won’t work right if pressed at the same time! Yes, you read that right. 10,000. And it gets worse if you try to press more at the same time.

Why do we stand for this? Well, 10,000 is a big number, but it typically works out to less than 5% of the 3-key combinations. So most combinations work. And manufacturers often try to move the bad combinations to places where they are less noticeable. (Ctrl-Alt-Del has to work!) So most people don’t even notice that there are these problems.

But the real reason we tolerate this is because, up until now, the alternatives were very expensive. The classic solution is to build the keyboard with a diode in series with each switch. That’s a lot of diodes, and there’s no good way of attaching those without resorting to a massive circuit board. So that puts the price of these keyboards out of reach for most gamers.

The big news is that we finally found a way to make keyboards that don’t have this problem, AND don’t cost a fortune. In a nutshell, the trick is to leverage multitouch technology. So now, ALL of the 3-key combinations work. The same with the 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, 7’s, etc. up to a ridiculous number.

As luck would have it, just as we figured this out, our design group was busily working on a low cost gaming keyboard to be called the SideWinder X4. So we decided to do something radical – we decided to put this very high-end multitouch feature in right away, rather than waiting for the next high-end keyboard. And the amazing thing was that we were able to do it without significantly impacting the cost. The SideWinder X4 has a U.S. list price of $59.99, putting it in a class by itself.

Want to know how good/bad your keyboard is? Visit our keyboard testing page…