Zboard Merc review

My old trusty keyboard finally packed in the other day so I found myself taking a look at what was available for the first time in years. I rapidly came to three conclusions:

1. That major manufacturers seem to think everyone wants a wireless keyboard and matching mouse in a box.

2. That it’s remarkably hard to find a good quality simple keyboard with a well spaced out layout (ie. Three keys wide above the cursor keys for lean lef/right in FPS games, etc).

3. That if you do find one of these, it costs a fortune because they’ve filled it with silly lights and LCD screens.

I was about to give in and settle for something that did more or less the right job when I saw this on the shelf and decided it was worth a try.

Zboard are famous for making keyboards with replaceable elements that allow you to set the entire keyboard up for a particular game. The problem has always been that the alternative keysets cost as much as a whole replacement keyboard, and are only made for a limited number of titles. The Merc keyboard is slightly different in that it provides a compact, high quality keyboard layout layout along with a permanent custom keypad containing 34 buttons laid out for optimal reach when gaming.

The Zboard connects via USB only and comes with a single driver disk and nothing more, Mindful of some of the rumours I’d heard about the USA Merc having driver problems I decided to skip this and grab a fresh version from the official site. Connect the Zboard first, allow it to be recognized as a standard device and then run the driver and it’s suddenly working. If the drivers aren’t there the main keyboard works fine, but the custom keypad will behave unpredictably and create seemingly random key combinations.

First impressions in use are good – the keys are all smooth and have a nicely damped action, the feet do a great job of stopping it sliding around on the table and the overall feel is one of solidity. It’s a surprisingly big keyboard (the monitor in the image is a 17” TFT) and you’ll find that you have to offset it to the left on your desk so that the spacebar falls centrally otherwise you’ll be reaching to the right to type. The key layout is conventional, but the cursor keys are incorporated into the numeric keypad in order to save space. The PGUP/PGDOWN/HOME/DEL keys are also here and can be accessed by turning NUMLOCK off. You’ll also notice hotkeys for cut, copy, paste, find and ‘My Computer’ although I can’t see these being more useful than the traditional CTRL+ keypresses. The UK version of this keyboard also gets a full sized ENTER key whereas the US version had a shift key sized version to allow some of the other keys to be relocated.

The top left of the keyboard is taken up by standard media player keys, including up and down volume controls. These keys are designed to work with media player, but they’ll work with any application that has global hotkey support – Winamp allows this, but has to be told in the options pages. You'll also find a Z key to access the MOD control software (more on that later..) and three programmable hotkeys that can be used to load your most used programs. Be aware that the Z-engine controller software takes a short time to load after startup, and pressing these hotkeys before it's fully ready may not have quite the effect you expected :)

Of course, the custom keypad is the star of the show here. It takes up the left hand edge of the Merc and has the keys arranged at a slight angle so that they fall more easily under your hand. The central pad duplicates the WASD/QE layout favoured by many gamers, there are keys numbered 1 – 11 just above for weapon selection, named keys for run/walk, jump, crouch, voice, score, use, reload and panic. You also have 6 blank keys for assigning other functions to, quickload, quicksave and screenshot. The tops of these keys are generally concave but some (panic, score and reload) are rounded to help you to locate your fingers when the rockets are flying, and the DOWN arrow has a small tag at the top for the same purpose. The entire keypad is far less damped than the main keyboard, and has a fast return rate allowing for some very rapid key combos.

Getting used to the Merc takes some time, but probably less than you’d expect. The keys feel perfectly laid out and you find that your fingers naturally fall in the right places after an hour or so. The Zboard controller chip in the keyboard has a technology that monitors simultaneous keypresses and delivers them in sequence so that buffer lockup never seems to occur and you can effectively chord as many keys together as you want. I tried to get it to lock up or bleep but failed miserably so I assume they’ve worked hard to get it right.
These keys can be configured within your games just as you would with any other, but if you can’t be bothered to do this the driver software has the ability to allow you to select from pre-made configurations (or MOD files as they’re called here) – all you have to do is tell the game to use the default key settings, and the MOD file configures the Merc to map the correct in-game keys to the labels on the keypad. If you find this a bit limiting, or that there isn’t a MOD file available for your game you can create your own.. or alternatively you can do what I do and just leave the board on the default MOD layout, configuring games as I go. The software is very easy to use, comes pre-loaded with MODs for most popular games, and will automatically check for new MOD files from the Zboard site if required.

The Merc is undoubtedly a great piece of kit, very well thought out and seemingly just as well built. Apart from the amount of space it takes up on the desk I haven’t managed to find a single issue, so I assume a lot of R&D work was carried out since the US release to work out all of the early bugs. As a keyboard alone it’s extremely good, as a gaming device it’s fantastic, but to get both together in one tidy and well resolved package is amazing. Top marks.

- Kuang