Xbox 360, FFXI, and Belkin KVM USB Switch

I thought that connecting my Xbox 360 to my PC monitor to take advantage of HD graphics without plunking down a metric ton of money for HDTV was brilliant and frugal (as frugal as one gets with these kinds of toys at least). So in the interest of further brilliance, I thought, how cool would it be to use my PC’s snazzy new USB keyboard with the 360 through the use of a KVM switch. My old keyboard was pre-ps/2 style, so it had a giant plug which I later had to plug into ps/2 style adapter. The whole thing hung precariously off the back on my PC and of late was suspected of causing problems on occasion. So after about 10 years of service, I wanted to change everything over to usb and the keyboard I picked up was only $20 USD.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Belkin products and I figured since they’re sold at Apple stores too, they are probably of pretty good quality in general. So I gave little thought to buying a Belkin KVM switch (F1DK102 U 2-port). And the switch even has built in cables. I got it home and connected everything as instructed, ready to retire my compact keyboard from the PS2 setup at last. Well, the thing didn’t work as planned at all. The PC keyboard was not being recognized when I switched to the Xbox 360. I could plug it in directly and it worked, so that meant a problem with the switch.

Then last night I stumbled upon a solution. I disconnected the USB mouse from the switch and plugged it into the PC directly since I didn’t need the mouse for Final Fantasy XI at all, and I thought that maybe it was confusing the issue. Next after playing around with the switch and powering up the Xbox and switching back and forth, I figured it out. The Xbox 360 apparently scans its USB ports only on power up. Therefore, if a device is not recognized during this time, it doesn’t get support. So by manually switching the KVM to the 360 and then quickly powering up, before the KVM autoswitches back to the PC, the keyboard is recognized.

The thing that made this difficult is that the Belkin KVM will switch back to the PC if it doesn’t detect that the Xbox is on via a powered USB port. The delay is about 2 or 3 seconds, so I think this is manageable. Still, if I had known this would be a problem, I would have sought out a switch that this strictly manual. As for the Xbox 360 itself, if it would only check for new devices optionally after power up, like PCs and Macs can, that would also solve this problem.

I don’t know if moving the mouse from the switch had anything to do with any of this, but I’m going to leave it connected to the PC for now. I hope this entry will be of use to anyone who has had this problem. I reported the problem to Xbox Live support, just so that there’d be a record of it. Perhaps a future update to the Dashboard will address this issue.