Hello everybody, and welcome back to another video.
Now, in today's episode, we're going to be doing a follow up to my
Ergodex DX1 Input System video
and talking about how you can use this thing on modern versions of Windows.
which was a question that a few of you guys asked.
I got a few comments on here saying, like
"Does this work in modern versions of Windows?"
"Does the driver work on Windows 11?"
"What's the deal?"
And the short answer is...
unfortunately not.
The official version of this driver that was released by Ergodex
back in 2005,
does not work at all on Windows 11 or Windows 10.
But
there is still a way to get this
Ergodex DX1 Input System functioning properly.
And if that's all you want to know how to do, there will be a chapter
in this video that just talks about this unofficial driver
that you can get for this thing.
But if you want to kind of hear
a bit more about what led to that unofficial driver's creation,
feel free to stick around because that's what we're going to be doing right now.
And to do that, we gotta talk a bit more about Ergodex
and kind of speculate as to what happened to them.
If we take a look at the Wayback Machine for Ergodex.com,
we can see that their website was last snapshotted back in 2017.
And afterwards, it just went dead.
There's no snapshots between 2018 and 2022.
Now what's interesting is
I went and looked at the very first snapshot that utilizes
this page layout here, and that was on March 11th, 2005.
If we go back to the 2005 listing here, you got March 11th
and the snapshot immediately before that is February 3rd, which if we open that up
you'll see is a completely different page layout here.
In fact, this was before the Ergodex was even released.
You still had to preorder it.
Now where things get really interesting is the first snapshot that utilizes
this page layout and the very last snapshot that we have available to us
from September 27th, 2017,
are identical.
Nothing on this page has been changed at all
except for the font here on the bottom for these links in the footer changing.
But yeah, so that got me thinking, okay, this is probably another case of
this company
just falling off the face of the Earth without telling anybody what happened.
And just leaving their users in the dark.
Because unfortunately for everybody who spent $150 for this thing at around
the time Windows Vista came out in late 2006 - early 2007,
they never released proper drivers for any operating system
newer than XP and they never released a 64 bit version of the driver either.
So that caused the community to get together and go:
"well, if they're not going to do it, we're going to do it."
And that led to the Ergodex open source drivers project
that was started by a person who goes by Hydra over on the website,
hydraproductions.com
And Hydra basically created this page to get the community together
to collaboratively develop open source drivers
that could be made available to everybody who wanted to still use this product
on newer versions of Windows.
And it was started in 2007 shortly after the release of Windows Vista.
And this page here just explains why they even had to do this in the first place.
And Hydra just goes on about how they never released drivers for Vista
or XP 64-bit,
let alone Mac OS X and Linux drivers and yes,
there was an attempt to create Mac OS and Linux drivers for this thing.
And actually there were drivers released
for Mac OS and Linux from this project, which is really, really cool.
Because that's something that the company never, ever did,
never even supported from the get-go.
So Hydra was able to reverse engineer the USB protocol
that allowed other developers to create drivers for this thing.
And those drivers were eventually released,
including one for Linux and one for Mac OS X.
Now unfortunately
the Linux and Mac OS X drivers very well may have been lost to time
because the Wayback Machine does not have either of these download links archived.
This is the Mac one here.
You can see it just doesn't have it archived at all.
They have the Linux one technically archived,
but the only snapshot is a redirect that...
well, that's not supposed to happen.
Let's reload that there.
The only snapshot is a redirect that takes you to
a HugeDomains parked page, I believe, which is the domain registrar
that Hydra had registered the domain with.
And yep, there it is.
So I guess they have that in common with Ergodex that the website just went dark
after a while.
But luckily Windows drivers were released and we still have access to them today.
One attempt was made by a person who goes by PolygonalHell.
Who started writing a driver, a 64-bit Vista driver after hearing about this project,
And that was eventually released in January of 2009.
Which I mean hey,
definitely newer than Ergodex's drivers, but still, they're over ten years old.
Luckily though, somebody decided to fork this project.
Someone by the name of EarthwormO, and ended up publishing that over on
Google Code.
Now, when Google Code was deprecated, essentially he moved it over to GitHub
and the latest version is the DX1 Utility 1.6,
and its accompanying driver that was released on October 13th, 2015.
But even though this is the newest driver that we have available
to us, it is not the best solution.
But I'm still going to demo it here and show you how it works.
The first major problem with this is this driver
is not digitally signed properly.
So that means that you have to disable driver signature enforcement on Windows,
which is going to be something that's going to set red flags off
for a lot of people who are watching this video that don't want to do that at all.
On top of that, the included utility is not the greatest.
I've got it running here.
It's a Visual Basic app, we can open it up here.
It does function.
It does allow you to map the Ergodex keys to specific functions.
But the major downside is it does not support multi key macros,
which is literally what you'd be using this thing for.
So you can map it to single keys just fine.
So like, let's say key number 8 here, if I want to map this
I'll right click and go to program.
It brings this up.
I can do single key just fine.
I can press whatever key I want and I can map it to it.
But if I want to do multi key,
or what it has as "Milti Key" in here.
You go to next and it says "not implemented yet"
and it's probably never going to be implemented because the project,
I mean, it was last updated in 2015 so it's probably long abandoned by now.
So that is a major problem.
And while we're here
let me show you what happens when you try to install the original driver here.
So this is the official Ergodex driver, we can run it here.
The installer will load up just fine.
We can click on next.
We can agree to the terms and conditions, say where we want to install it, next.
We can authenticate here with UAC, and then you'll get this error message:
"Error 1721"
"There's a problem with this Windows Installer package.
A program required for the install to complete could not be run."
Now you can run this in compatibility mode all you want.
It's not going to make a difference.
Now it does install the Ergodex Manager, technically, at least partially.
But when you try to run it, even in compatibility mode,
it just never opens.
It will eventually hang...
And there we go, not responding.
Now you can wait here
as long as you want, but it's not going to open up whatsoever.
So we're just going to cancel out of that and let it close.
So the best solution by far
is actually an older driver and an older piece of software
from the people over at In-Character Software, another nonexistent website.
This website is not around anymore, but we do have a snapshot of it
and we do have their driver and their configuration tool
that they created and updated until 2012, which is when Windows 8 was released.
First of all, we're going to uninstall
the Ergodex Manager software here...
Just get it fully uninstalled from our system.
And we've got the Ergodex DX1 plugged in...
so what we're going to do is first go into the driver folder here
and we're just going to extract this to the desktop
and we'll do the same with the driver- er, not the driver
but the suite itself, the configuration tool.
So we're going to open up Device Manager here.
And it will show an unidentified device here: DX1 Pad.
So we're going to right click go to properties, go to update driver,
we're going to browse my computer for drivers
and then let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer,
show all devices and hit next and then have disk.
Then you go to browse and you browse for that folder
and you want to select the "ErgoUSB.inf"
Open that up.
Hit ok.
And because this driver is properly signed, you don't have to disable
signature enforcement, which is a huge plus for sure.
So you have that selected, click on next.
It'll say "installing this device driver is not recommended
because Windows cannot verify that it's compatible with your hardware."
Just a little warning there from Windows.
We'll say, yes, we want to continue
and then we'll have to trust this driver here
from Patrick Hines, is the publisher who I assume
is the person behind that website there, if it's a solo project.
And there we go.
"Windows has successfully updated your drivers."
So now we've got the DX1 Pad installed, and it shows under
"Sound, video and game controllers"
So now if we install this
configuration tool here, we'll just run through this really quickly.
And then if we go to the start menu here, you see we've got a new program,
the DX-1 Configuration Tool, so we can open that up...
and you can definitely tell this was designed from around
the time Windows 8 was released.
So now what I can do is click the plus button down here.
And let's say that I want to make this a macro called "Task Manager."
We can make it a macro.
We want to press our desired key, let's say key number 13.
We press that, and now we press the keyboard combination.
So I'll do CTRL + SHIFT + ESC
It'll open up Task Manager.
Now it doesn't stop until you tell it to.
So we'll say stop here.
And there we go.
So now that's set up.
So now, if I hit key number 13...
it will open up Task Manager.
Though there is a bit of a delay there.
Let's say we want to add one and let's just do a single key.
You know what? Let's make this-
why can't I type in here?
Ok, what the heck?
Oh, and the program crashed, so.
(laughing)
Yeah, so it's not, it's not perfect
because I wasn't able to name it there just literally caused the entire thing.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, just clicking on it
makes the program freak out and quit.
Am I kind of screwed here?
Can I not?
Oh, my gosh, no. It's screwing up entirely.
(laughing)
So, yeah, I mean, it's not.
Oh, gosh. Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't experience this in my testing off camera.
Okay, so we've got all the other macros except for the default one removed,
and it seems no, the default one still causing it to crash.
Okay, so. Oh, no.
All right, well, I've set CTRL + SHIFT + ESC
to the default one here,
and that's going a lot faster.
That's instantaneous now, at least.
Well, that time it wasn't, but... that time, it wasn't either.
Like, here- you know, here's me pressing control shift escape on my keyboard, boom,
I'm pressing it now, you can see it immediately goes to the hourglass-
er, not the hourglass, but the spinning Aero wheel there.
Er, I guess not "Aero" wheel anymore, but yeah.
You press this...
still that little bit of latency.
Though, there was that one time where it happened instantaneously.
CTRL + ALT + DEL just appears not to be working at all.
Maybe that's a key combination that you can't do or something.
We'll just remove that.
Let's just do a single key...
"A"
Make it a single key...
we'll press 7,
and then "A"
there we go.
Yeah, that works just fine.
So yeah, you can map single keys just fine, and macros do work
Though there does appear-
oh, now it's not even doing anything.
Pressing 13...
It's not...
It's definitely not a perfect solution.
But of course, you have to keep in mind that this driver
was written for Windows 8.
We're trying to run on Windows 11 here.
Things are just going to break.
Of course, you have to expect that with running outdated drivers.
But I just think it's awesome that the community got together and just
said, you know what, if the company's not going to make these drivers,
we're going to do it ourselves.
And that just extended the life of this thing far beyond what
Ergodex ever did.
But that's pretty much all I've got for you guys today.
All the relevant links will be down below if you want to mess around with
this stuff.
But yeah, that's all I got, guys.
Huge thank you to everybody for watching.
And as always, I will see you in the next video.
(outro music)