Driver

For those of you without a CD/DVD player to make use of the included mini-CD, the software driver installer can also be downloaded from this page. The driver is product-specific, as the name suggests, and 1STPLAYER has similar software drivers for their other peripherals. A unified driver would be good here, although there are other, more pressing matters at hand as we shall see shortly. The installer is just 5.3 MB in size, and as seen above, its installation process is fairly straightforward. There is no option to choose whether or not to have shortcuts on the desktop or task menu, but those are no dealbreakers by any means. The final package takes up approximately 10.5 MB on your storage drive. Once installed, it will prompt you to open the program. It is best to have the keyboard connected before opening it, and the driver is light on system resources as well.


Opening it for the first time with the keyboard connected does not lead to a great start with the so-called New Invader driver opening in a tiny window no matter the resolution of your display. To make things worse, it does not respond well to display scaling in Windows either. Lastly, and possibly even the worst item on the list, it appears whoever worked on the driver realized this, but still tried to cram everything in, which leads to many text items jutting out of those boxes they are supposed to fit inside or just simply being cut off abruptly. Some menu items are so close to each other that text even overlaps, although the actual functionality is thankfully limited to the physical boxes themselves. Regardless, the user experience is really bad here, and 1STPLAYER really needs to improve on these basic functional aspects of the driver even before we get to other, less critical aspects.

The homepage, if you will, is simple enough to get things started. The driver allows for up to three profiles to be customized, each of which can have key assignment changes applied. This is done by clicking on the specific key of interest on the on-screen keyboard and choosing between available options. Unfortunately, this is made all the harder due to the issue brought up before, and I found myself being frustrated more often than I would have liked, which is never a good sign. Macro settings are generally fine, although assigning modifier keys in-between is a real pain because you have to manually add in each action while recording as the editing functionality is not strong. It has a dedicated menu item too, which is interesting as it is also one of the actions available in key assignment. One good thing I will say about the driver is that all changes are automatically applied, which saves time and avoids potential confusion regarding whether an "apply changes" button was clicked. Oh wait, there is an apply button after all, but it is only for choosing the profile.

Given this is an RGB-backlit keyboard with a software driver, having lighting controls in the driver simply had to be a thing, and thankfully, it is a part of the program despite there being no clear indication of it on the home screen. Maybe if some text underneath the macro item were not cut off? I hate to keep bringing this up over and over again, but I can't say enough about how bad the user experience is with this driver. Presumably, it stands for light/lighting, and checking the box brings up more options, including a drop-down menu as seen in the video above. There are ~19 preset effects to choose from, including variations of some of the popular static and dynamic effects. One of the presets is a collection of lighting modes for game types; FPS, MOBA, and so on, and the specific effects also have their own settings to choose from, including individual color (256 shades of R/G/B channel for 16.8 M options), brightness (4 steps + off), speed, and direction of effect. The customize option in the group allows for per-key static lighting as well, which is nice to see.