USB keyboard works in windows but not in games

Question

I have a problem with a new PC i just built.

It has 6 USB3 ports on the rear, and no USB2 ports. When I plug my Logitech G15 v2 in the rear USB3 ports it works fine in both BIOS and windows - however, when I launch a game, the keyboard no longer works.

I am running Windows 7 pro x64 with SP1.

All drivers are installed from motherboard manufacturers homepage.

I tried all the USB ports on the rear.

When I plug it into my FP USB2 port it works fine, so seems like an issue with the USB3 ports.

How do I make it work in the USB3 ports?

Answer 1

On the original IBM PC, whenever a key was pressed or released, the keyboard would send a byte whose upper bit indicated whether a key was newly pressed or newly released, and whose lower 7 bits would identify the key. On later keyboards which added things like extra control keys, pressing or releasing one of the control keys will cause the keyboard to send out a prefix byte indicating "something was done with a duplicated key; the action affected the second one" followed by a "control key was pressed". Trying to effectively handle this was much more of a nuisance than simply having two codes for the control key would have been, but the latter approach would have resulted in the extra control key being unusable by any software that doesn't know what its code represents.

USB keyboards use a somewhat different approach; they report what keys are pressed at any given time, up to a maximum of four, and indicate when the pressed combination of keys changes, but they don't report individual events the way older keyboards did.

Depending upon how games expected to interact with keyboards, the games may be looking for key-press or key-release events which don't correspond to anything that USB keyboards generate.