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I am positively surprised how many newer games support RGB keyboards these days so I was looking around a bit and found an SDK for my keyboard (Logitech G810) and it looks pretty straight forward to make them keys light up during runtime (before that I thought all you could do was to upload predefined color profiles via the Logitech gaming software, but this doesnt seem to be the case).

Sooo, I get that doing a demo straight on a keyboard is probably not so appealing because most people do not have one or want to pay hundred bucks for these fancy LED thingamabobs but supporting them in a "classic" demo would ne a real nice touch! Im sure you can find a lot of usecases, be it loaderbards or scrollers or even interactive parts?
Also Im not sure if every RGB keyboard manufacturer is cooking their own soup at the moment, but I think the industry would be very interested in a "general purpose" approach so I guess there are options?

also loaderbards are the next cool thing, everyone should have at least 1...

This is pretty pointless, because people sitting in front of a bigscreen have no idea what the keyboard somewhere at the beamteam at the back of the hall is showing. Or the people watching it on youtube afterwards. Or everybody with a non-ridiculous keyboard.

well one could consider it a hidden part or something? =)
But yes, for the compo it wouldnt add anything if not being a wild release done esp for the keyboard and entered as a recording (which then again would make it just a pretty low res display I guess...).

That keyboard is more expensive than my graphics card.

like back in the DOS days that some demos did num/caps/scroll-lock blinking. awesomesauce that was! i'd find it utterly annoying when my keyboard would blink under my monitor tho, i even toggle the lights off when watching a movie :P

Poor man's (hah) ambient light?

About as useless "nice touch" as blinking the disk drive led in tune with your music, as some Atari and Amstrad demos did.

If you want an hardware-specific hidden part, do things when a printer is connected! Who can say no to a photo-quality hardcopy of the best screens in your demo?

The pros use a matrix printer as additional noise-channel for they plaback routine I hear!

*their playback routine...

I certainly wouldn't say no to that!

My ink cartridges bill wants to have a word with you.

You can use the tape motor toggle on the BBC Micro as an extra percussion channel, that was pretty ace. Did that in a tracker I wrote at school.

I'm sure someone will probably make something demoish with one of those keyboards as a wild entry someday. Actually don't they come with plasma sort of effects and such already?

I would probably play around with it just for fun if I had one but they cost $250 Australian Dollarydoos and that's a bit too much for a novelty item for me.

I got to admit it really took me by surprise when my G910 reacted to GTA5 in a really cool way (If chased by police the keys start blinking like the blue/red lights of police cars, even alternating in blocks) ...but i guess most people don´t have such a keyboard, so making use of it in demos would be really just for very few people, some kind of a hidden part hidden to almost everyone! I don´t see me wasting time on this! Especially considering such APIs get outdated pretty fast...once you get a new keyboard, this has a new driver coming with a new API. (Well, maybe not...using the Logitech Gaming Software (and predecessor) for 6 years already here...) If there would be some general access to all of the keyboards from all manufacturers this would be more of an idea!

Hack it, write your own firmware and open-source it so we can still use it in 10 years...

The good thing is the display has a hardware char set already. Just light the appropriate keys. Hard to make a scroller though... ;)

back in the day I suggested to doom that it would be nifty to smoothly fade th amiga power led with pwm, and he did, and it was indeed nifty.

1) Make a RGB keyboard demo
2) Capture it
3) Show it as wild compo in a party
...
4) profit

You can already play snake on some keyboards

razer, corsair, logitech, cherry... is there a standard sdk that supports all those ? Direct-RGBK or OpenRGBKL I guess :)

this supported the LEDs on Dell XPS laptops, when available (don't think anyone ever noticed apart from bstrr who tested the implementation).

I suppose engines like Unity or UE4 would be the natural place to support those, but of course it would be cool if there would be a size optimized open source lib which does the same... someone please code one! ;)

go make a wil out of it!