After a few years playing the DesertCombat mod for Battlefield 1942 (I was the video guy for the DC test team), I moved house and lost broadband for nearly 18 months. Towards the end of that period, I started playing Lockon (LOMAC) in single player. My HOTAS provided me with what I thought at the time was more buttons than I would ever need... yeah... right :)
After a while (i.e when I needed more buttons again), I got myself a Belkin Nostromo gamepad, and mapped a load of options onto that as time went along:
This worked fine for a while, with multiple shift states, and a mouse wheel and a D-Pad, but after a while it started to become a bit clumsy. Having to take my left hand off the throttle and place it on the gamepad made it a bit tricky to use at points. I needed something with more buttons that didnt require a shift state to operate (and didnt require my brain to have to work out what shift state I required :) )
I did toy with the idea of getting a Saitek PCDash from somewhere:
But it just didnt look like something that would do anything more than the game pad.
After a while, I got myself an X-Keys unit:
58 keys of USB goodness. And it was good.... easy to set up, easy to print out custom key tops to group buttons together.
I used this for a while, adding new key top images as I went along.... but something was nagging at me, and I couldnt work out what it was.
Battlefield2 came along and suddenly I knew what that nagging was. Once the X-Keys have had custom key tops inserted, it was impossible to change them on a per game basis without having to go through the fiddley process of taking the key tops off and changing them.... and changing them back again.
What I was looking for was a gamepad type device that would allow the quick and easy swapping of the key tops, but I could not find such a device :(