The
Warboard gaming keyboard has a design that is very similar to most normal computer keyboards, as far as key layout. In addition to the normal keys, however, the
Warboard has two columns of five macro keys: one on the left side of the keyboard and another on the right side. These keys can be used to execute macros that consist of keypresses and mouse actions, using the included driver software. You can set up a profile with different actions for these macro keys as well as what resolution you want the screen set to and then save your profile and load it when you want to play the game the profile was made for. You can also store some information, such as author's name, a description and the game it was made for, then share your macro profiles with other
Warboard owners. Pretty cool. These macros can be useful in-game and you actually can set up to twenty macros, since the
Warboard has two "banks" of Macros; you can switch to the second bank of macros (M11-M20) by using the Macro mode button at the top left of the
Warboard. I find that I typically have one bank for fighting-related and health-related macros and the second bank for less time-intensive items, such as Inventory, Maps and that sort of thing. If something is vitally important and
always needs to be available, of course, you can simply program a macro button to be the same thing in both Macro modes. When creating or editing a macro, you can choose what you want for your keypress delays to be, allowing you to make your macros as fast as the game in question will recognize them or to slow the macro down to allow for certain actions to complete before triggering another one.
I feel that I should mention that while the macros are very useful for games, they also can be very useful outside of games. For example, I have one template that I made for when I'm just tooling aroung the net: one macro key that will navigate to GameVortex.com for me, one to go to our content management system, etc. You can even make macros for doing common navigation tasks on pages, since the keyboard macros simply are sending strings of commands.
In addition to the macro keys and the normal keys, the Warboard has a collection of media buttons at the top of the keyboard: "Volume Down", "Volume Up", "Mute", "Rewind", "Fast Forward", "Play" and "Stop". There are three more buttons of interest at the top of the keyboard, a "Calculator" button, which launches Window's Calculator program, a "Search" button, which launches a new Windows Search Window (to search your files for something) and a "Windows Key Lock" button. The "Windows Key Lock" button is something I hadn't seen before; this button locks the Windows key in its current position until you turn off the Windows Key Lock. The way this would prove useful would be to press the Windows Key Lock when the Windows key is not pressed. This would prevent you from accidentally activating some Windows key command if you happened to hit the Windows key while trying to do something. However, if you press the Windows key and then press the Windows Key Lock while holding the Windows key down, the Windows key behaves as if it were constantly held down. At that point, if you simply hit the "L" key, you will activate the Windows key command to log out of your account. I don't know that this is a very useful mode to be in, but as long as you realize how this feature behaves, it doesn't cause any problems.
All of the standard keys on the Warboard (not including some of the non-standard shaped keys, such as "Enter" and the Spacebar) are removable and interchangeable. In addition, the Warboard includes 17 specialty keys that you can swap your normal keys for, changing them from "1", for example, to a pistol, Uzi or shotgun. Among these 17 specialty keys are a second set of key-tops for the commonly used "WASD" directional controls. These replacements have their letters, but also include an arrow indicating their "WASD" direction. Swapping your key-tops around and using these special key-tops allows you to really customize the layout and look of your keyboard to make it right for the way you play games.
