Only tangentially related, but I've found myself down a rabbit hole with some ancient BigKeys keyboards (designed/manufactured by Greystone Digital), and a small handful of them have a physical switch on their underside that switches them between QWERTY and ASDF layout; it's genuinely perplexing because the code theyre running on the boards is not at all standard PS/2 or USB (save a few later revisions/models). There is a DFK48 V1.2 (mfg 1994) that I have been fighting with for some time now, and it angers me to no end.

The lengths that peripheral manufacturers will go to to create "functionality" is wild, having looked at hardware like this for the first time. Granted, I'm working with what is widely considered an accessibility HID, the fact that "stickey keys" (as theyre known in Windows) is a default function of this keyboard, which breaks all common passive PS/2 -> USB adapters due to encoding differences, significantly fucks up my workflow in using it with modern hardware by using unique encodings AFAICT. It's a wonderful puzzle, but an annoyance for someone trying to accomplish anything.

I'm confident this shit could be oneshot with LLMs, but that's not the point of the work, in case anyone was considering chiming in about them.

Part of me needs to realize that this was made 30+ years ago, before we knew what we now know. But another part of me feels intense animosity for such early, unabashed, and shameless abandon in regards to HID standards/protocols. Using what is effectively Stickey Keys by default and breaking PS/2 -> USB adaptability because of that is annoying as hell, even if the thing is $50 on ebay.