Software

Right, I was told that drivers for the Marsback M1 were still in the works as of the Kickstarter campaign, and the GIF above says it all. The software installer can be found on the Marsback support page, which in turn leads to a Google Drive folder. The folder contains the 63 MB installer, as well as a PDF file that goes over the installation and clearly acknowledging the text placeholders used at this time. The PDF has snapshots of each stage, with arrows and boxes in red walking you through the selection process for the installation. While what some of these steps are may be deduced logically, I am not happy about choosing any options I don't really know! Forget accepting any terms of service agreement—you could be agreeing to sending data to the company, too. I realize it's a work in progress, but keep in mind that you should demand for the company to release transparent software drivers if you commit to purchasing this keyboard. I of course added firewall rules right away and uninstalled the drivers after testing.


Marsback Pro, the driver suite, only supports Windows at this time, which makes it all the more ironic that the press samples didn't even come with Windows keycaps. Either way, we see a home page that is mostly bare aside from the keyboard identifier and a "REDETECT" option if you connect more compatible devices after opening the program. This clearly shows that the company has plans for a unifying software package, and clicking on the Marsback M1 item takes us to its device-specific settings.

The user manual does a good job of walking the user through using Marsback Pro with the M1 keyboard, even with the typos and errors in grammar. There are also a few bugs, such as missing options for some lighting effects and some working the other way round (custom RGB on vs. off is swapped). However, this was a much better experience than I thought it would be. Perhaps "under-promise and over-deliver" worked here, but Marsback Pro scales very well with Windows 10 even in the absence of a full screen/maximize option. There are profiles to create and modify, which are saved to the device. Each profile can have key mapping as well, where a virtual keyboard on the screen is used to select and change the key to anything of your liking as long as it involves mouse buttons, some preset multimedia functions, or a key remap/macro altogether. You can also turn a key off, but that seems like a weird move on a smaller form factor such as this.

Lighting effects are done separately for backlighting and their so-called underlighting, with more options for the former. There are sub-options for some effects, and I do like the color selector triangle, although the R/G/B sliders and input boxes are easier for choosing from 256 brightness levels per color for a total of 16.8 M colors. There is also an overall brightness slider which stops at 10% rather than completely off. Underlighting has three brightness steps, as well as a backlink button that links it to the backlighting effect. The lighting effects are saved instantaneously, and some need the software to be running in the background, whereas profile/key mapping requires a hardware save onboard the device, which has the keyboard turn off momentarily to flash the onboard firmware with the updates before booting up again for Windows detection. Note that Marsback states not to use the update feature just yet, although it clearly does not do anything harmful.

There remain several things to do here, but a strong skeleton has already been put into place. Based on the timeline for the Kickstarter deliverables, they should at least be able to correct the bugs and remove any English errors in time, and may even be able to add more features and macOS support. Marsback says that these issues are expected to be resolved by July.