Drivers

The drivers for the Tarantula can do a lot of tricky stuff. One of these unique features is the ability to swap every button on the keyboard. This particular function can come in handy if you play e.g. Battlefield 2 / 2142 where you can't use the arrow keys instead of WASD, with the Tarantula you can rebind WASD to the arrows keys to one of the 6 profiles you can store on the keyboard. By doing this you can get around the natural limitations of the game and thereby improving your game.



Here we have the basic layout of the driver for the Tarantula, it's quite simple. The way to use it is to press one of the buttons on the keyboard that you want to reassign, click it and then press the button you want it to replicate.



If you click the profile selection button this little menu pops up and lets you choose the profile you want to use. Because the keyboard has 32kb. of internal memory you can store up to 6 different profiles directly on the keyboard, these stored profiles can be used on any PC even one that doesn't have the Tarantula drivers installed.



If you press one of the macro keys you get this dialog. It basically lets you record any macro into the one of the L/R keys. The only thing I find a bit annoying about this is that you can't store more than 8 keystrokes which is hardly enough for any useful macro, at least for my use. The stuff I normally have as macro is some mIRC scripts and some greetings for CS:S and BF2. That is at the moment impossible because the driver only lets you create macros consisting of 8 keystrokes.



If you want to reassign a key, all you have to do is point at the key in the basic driver window and press the left mouse button, once you have done this a little dialog pops up and lets you assign a new key.

Performance

Well this is really hard to test with a keyboard because what defines a "good" keyboard. For me a good keyboard should have some keys with minimal traveling length, this should make the keyboard feel faster because you don't have to press the keys a long way before the action is done on screen.

The Tarantula is quite special because it has some anti ghosting features this means that the key grid which sends information about a key being pressed is divided into several pieces each capable of registering a given amount of key presses. I tried stressing it in CS:S but I couldn't gain a benefit from this, I think you have to play some of the special special games where you utilizes many keys at one time like i.e. O2 Jam or some games in that particular genre.

One of the things I really liked about the Tarantula is the feel of the keys, they are a bit harder than the keys on by G15 and have a shorter traveling length. Another thing that makes the keys on the Tarantula a bit special is that their height is something in between that of notebook keyboard's and a regular keyboard. It seems like a nice compromise while gaming and is quite comfortable to work with.

I tried testing the macro functions in BF2 and they worked alright, I guess if you play a lot of WOW or WC3 it's a nice function because you can spare yourself some key strokes.