Excellent! And just so I don’t send you off on a wild goose chase, “Electron” is not the app’s name, just the platform (a browser wrapper, basically) that VIA uses for its desktop app. It’ll be on VIA’s github page, if not their main page. Glad you got it all squared away though. That’s a truly silly default keymap for what I understand is a super nice keyboard.

Just in case you’re still looking…

1. If you’re on Linux, don’t use the VIA web app, even if the build guide says to. Download the Electron app because it knows to ask for the right permissions and doesn’t apply them to everything you browse. In either event, make sure you grabbed the json to upload.
2. That strikes me as odd that there would be no arrows enabled at all. If you still can’t get into VIA go to some keyboard tester and try literally every key with and without Fn. It shouldn’t take too long for a 60%.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

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For the Epomaker, not bad at all. You can either futz with your privacy settings to let it work in a Chromium based browser, or simply download the contained VIA app. I dual boot, so I haven’t tried to install or run software from RK or Redragon or any of the other brands still using proprietary software. It might work, but honestly I am just not sure. If you do have to dig up a Windows PC, any changes you make should be stored on the keyboard itself and will be persistent across reboots. On the plus side, it isn’t so much the driver you have to be woriied about. It is just USB HID. The onyl issue is whetyher you’ll be able to remap keys and adjust lighting without resorting to whatever Fn+Key combos Royal Kludge builds in.

As I mentioned, Epomaker are no saints, and stories of their poor customer support are numerous. Buy from a third-party retailer (Amazon works well if you can stomach it) with a generous return policy and assume you’ll need to make a final decision by the time the return window closes. Beyond that, they just commission factories to do a run of a given board and re-badge it. Sometimes no one else does the same board, sometimes several someones do. They’re a glorified White Label, but that has the benefit that sometimes the hardware itself is quite nice.

For the switches, the same basic types still exist as with Cherry, but that market has exploded since their patent ran out. There’s still clicky (self explanatory), linear (smooth action on press), and tactile (a bump of some sort that requires extra pressure to overcome, but not intentionally noisy). There are also still multiple weights. The original Cherrys and clones are still around as a baseline: Red = Light-medium Linear; Brown = light-med Tactile; Blue = medium clicky. Heavier versions of each are Black, Clear, and Green, respectively. If the name of the switch is any more complicated than that (e.g. “Epomaker Wisteria,” or “Holy Panda” or the like), you need to parse the listing to see if it’s the type of switch you’d like. Switches also frequently come lubed from the factory these days, which can be nice for Linears and Tactiles.

I haven’t tried that board, but yeah, your options in that range are limited. I might consider instead the Epomaker Split65. You lose the macro keys but gain a knob and VIA. Neither RK nor Epomaker are particularly good citizens when it comes to respecting the QMK open source license, but the actual usability of the Epomaker on VIA is going to be better, and sometimes they contribute their firmware back. Low-end closed-source Keyboard software is generally quite bad.

Actual typing quality could be a deciding factor. To that end, I’ll happily let others weigh in. Worth noting to make sure you get switches you like, which may mean getting replacements. The RK seems to have “fast linears” (so early actuation point and often a fairly light spring) or Browns (tactile, and generally no better than “okay”), while the Epomaker has somewhat light linears (45g) or very light linears (45g).

While I’m glad they aren’t entirely ignoring the elephant in the room, what I’m humbly suggesting is that they’re wrong. It’s a rather inadequate compromise, and you might as well just use RetroArch on a tablet, which could get closer to the original screen size anyway.

If the gameplay itself hits your nostalgia feels, then okay, modern gear can make it playable and… fine. But vector CRT games were just so deeply tied to the way the CRT worked that you can never properly capture their spirit in raster form, especially on a tiny and so-so panel. I’m not even much of a purist, but vector is special and this… isn’t.

Experience the spirit of the original Vectrex

AMOLED display with a resolution of 800×600

These two thoughts are not compatible.

I’m not Brazilian or French, so my main memory is walking past the boxes on the store’s video games aisle. The graph paper pattern on the labels was cool.

It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”

Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.

So unlike apparently everyone else on these threads, I actually have a Model M. Okay, technically I have three Model Ms, but still…

What kind of PS/2 cable is it? permanent or modular?

Is it still working, even if it looks rough?

Are you comfortable soldering?

If not, are you at least comfortable following a simple wiring diagram?

It certainly doesn’t help that they shared a name with the Amiga digital camera/scanner perhipheral. I found a listing in the July 2000 issue of Computer Shopper where “Bay Micro Computers” out of Torrance California was selling the aforementioned “beige box” AMD PCs with Digiview keyboards. One of the keyboards was on eBay, and it seems like a bog standard rebadged OEM membrane keyboard of the era.

You can extend the matrix across so it becomes one board, but it means custom wiring the connector.

Yeah, physically that will work. I should have mentioned that, as it’s what I did (permanently wired) on my failure of an ergo split to get it split at all with one MCU, but electrically it worked perfectly fine. Proper USB-C/Thunderbolt like the caravan 2 seems like it would be a good solution for a PCB, and I’m curious what issues the mini HDMI produced (crosstalk maybe, or just complaining about sourcing mini to mini cables?). Ethernet or DB9 should do for hand-wired, though obviously bulkier.

I will admit I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of a split keyboard that was viewed as one unit by the host device AND that had more than two parts. I don’t think the usual suspects for firmware will support that, though I could be wrong. That said, if you can live with more cords there’s no particular reason you couldn’t make it a split keyboard and two macro pads, or two split keyboards. To the computer, “keypresses is keypresses” for the most part. In any event, this could work out fine in several different approaches.

I’ll echo @junderwood@lemmy.world and say that I don’t believe there are any commercially available half-height keyboard switches with proper keycaps, though I’m sure there are various pushbutton switches that could give you the basic functionality. Still, I might write that one off for now.

For the layout, your stagger looks modest but fine; that’s very much a personal thing though, and I completely borked it on my first (and only) split board. One other thing I didn’t love about my split was having two vertical tiers of thumb keys. Thumbs are strong but short and move differently. Clearly it can work, but more often you’ll see the arc extended rather than stacking. In any event, I’d recommend at least printing up a full-size copy of the layout and seeing how your fingers will need to move to hit everything you’d like. It’s far short of a full mockup, but it would have a great value-to-effort ratio. :-)

For the numpad, I don’t know your use case but backslashes aren’t commonly used for math (right?) or data entry so I might move the dot/comma separator onto that group of four and park backslash somewhere else. The keymap beyond that should be fully programmable, so maybe just don’t spend big on custom keycaps until you’re sure you’ve settled in on something you like. A lot of people at !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world (and elsewhere) will use all blanks or blanks on the mods.

My eleven year old loves it, and it’s decent in that way where it will take a good bit longer for the music to drive you nuts.

I have a Ducky One Mini, so a 60%.

Likes: Better build quality than most plastic-case boards. Genuine Cherry switches, while not quite the selling point they used to be, are better than commodity clones. Convenient DIP switches for a few common settings. Everything just generally feels decent and solid.

Dislikes: Not hot-swap, though I think the One 3 might be?. Kinda pricy at MSRP, but if selection is limited then it is what it is. I do thoroughly dislike that for my board the complicated and obtuse on-board remapping/macro functionality is the only way to do it. If either of the ones you’re looking at supports on-PC software, even Windows, do it. This may be less of an issue if this will be your primary board and you won’t have to change things up often.

Along with Filco, they sort of are what they are: high quality but non-hobbyist Taiwan-designed boards with design philosophies that are just now creeping out of the 2010s. That’s not strictly meant to be a criticism. I often use boards that are literally from early 90s, but it does sort of describe a certain set of expectations about materials, performance, programmability, etc.

IMHO no version of Tetris will ever top the OG green-n-gray Game Boy version, which was also over the top Russian kitschy. The music still loves rent free in my head, and the patterns in lieu of colors define the blocks for me.