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I hate companies that rip people off! I'm posting my experiences with this company and its products so that other people may avoid having the same unpleasant experience!
What has Hagstrom done? Well, nothing particularly bad if you don't know any better. They, like many other companies, have been making keyboard encoders for quite a while. The target market was typically POS and manufacturing work center applications. Their products were never designed to be used as arcade controller interfaces.
I purchased 2 different encoders from Hagstrom and a friend of mine purchased one. He has a PHD in electrical engineering and has been designing embedded systems and devices for about 17 years. I have a bachelors in EE but I'm a software engineer of 15 years experience.
Anyway, we both purchased these products and had problems with random lockups and with the controller getting "stuck" while it spit out thousands of bits of random data. For the most part the controllers worked OK but they just wouldn't hold up to our multi-player control panels. We decided to reverse engineer the encoders and either put the EPROM code into a faster processor or use their code in our own souped up controller.
Neither of these options came to pass because we found 3 patent infringements (1 on Acer Computing), 2 out of spec electrical issues and numerous programming errors. The program code was so bad in fact that we didn't even use it when we made our own controller. We found several cases where the controller would get stuck polling just 1 input, giving it priority over the other inputs. We also found cases where the controller would send random, useless garbage to the computer because it would fall out of sync when transmitting. Finally we found that the code was so inefficient that it would allow an unreasonably small number of input scans per second.
When we talked to Hagstrom about these defects they insisted that their encoders weren't built for the purpose we were using them and that we had voided our warranty by using them that way. Hagstrom refused to correct the defects and refused to provide a refund. Later they refused to even talk to us anymore!
My friend and I have looked at encoders from 4 other companies. We couldn't get into one of them and were unable to reverse-engineer it. Two of the encoders were superior to Hagstrom's and the other was about equal because it too had defects.
Eventually we made our own encoder that has performed flawlessly for keyboard encoding. We're currently expanding it to include spinner scanning and ps/2, serial and keyboard output of spinner data.
I'm not saying that Hagstrom's products are worthless. They work OK for some people and in some applications. If you're expecting perfect performance from these products then I think you should look at other manufacturers who don't have these same problems. Hagstrom wasn't exactly supportive to us as customers either. Beware of trusting them!