USB vs. PS/2 for hardware multiboxing

[Darm]

I've been very happy with keyclone for WoW, but I probably can't expect him to support multiboxing for every game that I play.

I've been doing research on hardware solutions, and in Xzin's helpful guide it is clear that he prefers PS/2 over USB. That was written over a year ago I believe, and looking around, it seems like there are both USB multicasters and USB KVM switches. PS/2 models are still available.

I'm a little concerned that if I do go the PS/2 route, all of this hardware might not work with the next PC I build. Perhaps that's an overreaction -- floppy drives were written off for dead more than 10 years ago and if you want to have one, it's still possible to do.

Generally though, I'm very happy with all of USB peripherals and would prefer not to switch. So, I guess the question is -- is there anyone out there using USB for hardware multiboxing and are they satisfied with their results?

[Xzin]

USB is modern but for lots of key input it is actually more of a hack in that it's not as good. I have gone into the reasons why plenty of times. PS/2 was designed for text input. It has a few drawbacks but all told and even though USB has far more bandwidth - it is NOT the best input device. There is probably a HID model that would be the best (and that could use USB) but the fact remains that a simple text only input is the easiest to work with and the easiest to split up and multicast.

[Darm]

Fair enough.

I am kind of interested in doing a controlled trial, although it certainly would be expensive. If the USB version of things turns out to work reasonably well, perhaps I'd be able to give someone a bargain on a slightly used PS/2 set of hardware.

[Wilbur]

USB is a bad idea for use in conjunction with Multicasters/KVMs. This is because of the handshaking lag which takes place whenever you connect a USB peripheral. With a KVM what you are effectively doing is disconnecting it from one machine and plugging it into another, thus you will get this handshaking lag every single time you change the machine you are attempting to send input to. With PS2 there isn't this problem.

[Xzin]

That's a good point too. Any KVM switches will be slower. On a PS/2 KVM, you can swap in probably 200 to 350 ms at most. USB is far slower. There may be some enterprise optimized USB KVMs that do it faster but I don't know of any off hand and the cost would obviously be quite higher than a cheap one.

PS/2 was designed for text input. It can handle lots of key presses and lots of keys being hit at once. USB starts to fail and drop keys. PS/2 CAN drop keys and some keys result in multiple key codes being sent, but by and large, PS/2 is superior to USB input for nearly everybody who wants to go the hardware route. Software only on one box? USB may work just fine. But you STILL may run into problems when you hit tons of keys in a short period of time. Considering some "keys" are actually as many as 3 or so keys (alt+shift+f5 as an example) - you can hit the limit real fast if you are in the heat of combat and mashing keys as fast as you can to get that heal off.