[geeks] new keyboard goodness

[Jonathan Groll]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:11:51 -0400, <nate at portents.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:28:43 -0400 (EDT), der Mouse
> <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG> wrote:
> >>> Is Nkey rollover important though?
> >
> >> Yes, very.
> >
> >> I can type fast enough to outrun any keyboard without it.
> >
> > ...huh?
> >
> > What is rollover, then?  What I thought it was was the ability to
> > correctly detect a key going up or down even with one other arbitrary
> > key down (two-key rollover) or two others (three-key rollover) or etc,
> > up to an arbitrary number of other keys down (N-key rollover).
> >
> > Speed - of anything - is completely irrelevant to this property.
> >
> > What do you understand rollover to be?
> 
> This is actually a complex topic, and I recommend you start here:
> 
> http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=NKey+Rollover+-+Overview+Testing+Methodology+and+Results

Interesting stuff indeed, thanks for the illumination folks. Even with
simple testing in a text-file I can see that my Lenovo laptop keyboard
fails W-A-S, A-S-X and also Capslock-LShift-S, all of which my Kinesis
keyboard can do.

I guess I was confused by the geekhack wiki itself which says: "In
general this is a gaming, not a typing issue since 99% of keyboards
are 2KRO which is fine for typing."

I can see now that it may not be exclusively a gaming problem as
non-gamers might need better key rollover. Granted, if one were to
press W-A-S simultaneously it is also unclear what your intentions are
- do you want "was" or "saw" to appear in your text file? What
specific key combinations would be needed (but not available) for
non-gamers?

And it also makes me wonder about those heavily chorded keyboards of
days gone by - like the Space Cadet keyboard [1] - how well were
complex key combinations like hyper-meta-shift-S supported? Did these
keyboards suffer from similar rollover issues?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[1] http://tinyurl.com/jdjtr