.

KeyboardEmperor

If you use Windows and like speed, you may have heard of Keyboard King, a program that allows accelerating your keyboard repeat rate to over Windows’ maximum limit. However, if you did use Keyboard King, you probably ran into its shortcomings: the method it uses to accelerate the repeat rate is buggy, because the approach it uses is insufficient.

Enter KeyboardEmperor, a kernel-mode hack that changes the repeat rate value directly in Windows’ USB keyboard driver. PS/2 keyboards implement key repeat themselves, however, as USB keyboards use a polling protocol, key repeat rate is done by the OS. Unfortunately, Windows has an unreasonably low maximum limit for the repeat speed - which is what KeyboardEmperor attempts to solve. (Of course, the problem doesn’t exist on Linux, as xset has no such limitations.)

To use KeyboardEmperor, build it using the Windows DDK, then load the .sys file into the kernel. An .inf file is provided to facilitate this.

Unfortunately, no binaries are provided - nor would they be usable on arbitrary systems without signing. Windows 10 compatibility is untested.

Note: this article is back-dated, and was originally written on 2018-11-06.

Comments