Anyone ever use one of these? Any idea if it would work with a game built with Unity?
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=157024#
NewEgg’s got them on sale for $18.00, wonder if it’s worth trying…
Yuck. Shouldn’t we be trying to abandon binary/digital control mechanisms? Still, a bunch of on/off-only buttons isn’t wholly a bad thing, but a lot of casual and hardcore gamers already have a peripheral with at least 40 of those.
Put a trackball in place of the d-pad, make the keys pressure-sensitive, and make it light-up purple, and then I’ll be all over this. 
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t even sure how you would use this when I first posted this. Do you configure the keys for custom functions for your left hand and use a joystick in your right? My gamepad (the only input device I really use) already has 8 buttons, plus a t-pad and two analog joysticks, so that’s plenty for me, but I thought maybe I might be missing something.
I think the power of this device lies in the d-pad. Using one thumb to take care of the duties that three fingers might normally be doing (WASD) frees up your fingers to do whatever you want with the remaining keys and scroll wheel. The other hand would normally be controlling a mouse.
The orange button and the enter key being where they are doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but they apparently got input from a slew of gamers, so what do I know?
If it works with OS X (which it does), then it should work with Unity. Here’s a Mac-centric review. Apple even has some Intel Mac drivers. (Which I guess means you can ignore some of the user reviews from the first link.)
–Eric
I was thinking about getting one of these recently - if it can cope with some games that require you to hold down the shift key to run without killing your wrist then I should grab one. Basically iI don’t think it’s anything more complicated than a subset of a standard usb keyboard with built in wrist-rest which is supposedly arranged to access all the functions you require with greater ease than a full keyboard. I assume the software purely allows you to assign which key each button represents and possibly a sequence of key presses or macros to act as shortcuts.