This is my review of Delcom's 903603-5M USB HID Tri Delcom Foot Switch w/ 5M Cable. These are my personal experiences with this particular set of foot pedals mostly from a gamer's perspective as that is why I bought them.
The product page for the foot pedals is:
http://www.delcomproducts.com/productdetails.asp?productnum=903603-5M
Main System Configuration:
-Motherboard:Gigabyte EX58-UD5
-Processor: Intel I7 920
-Memory: 12GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 1600 OCZ3P1600LV6GK
-CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12P SE1366
-Hard Drive: Intel X-25MG1 80GB
-Hard Drive: 5 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black
-Hard Drive: 2TB WD Caviar Black
-GPU: 2 x XFX AMD Radeon 5870
-Sound Card: onboard Realtek ALC889A
-Sound Card: Creative WOW Wireless headset
-Optical Drive: Pioneer BD-RW BDR-203
-Optical Drive: Plextor DVDR PX-880SA
-PSU: BFG Tech EX-1200 BFGR1200WEXPSU 1200W
-Case: Thermaltake Armor Series VA8003BWS
-Display: BenQ 2400WD DVI
-Display: Lenovo ThinkVision 2440X DisplayPort
-Display: Samsung 2433BW DVI
-USB Device: HP ScanJet G3110
-USB Device: FireFly Remote/Reciever
-USB Device: Creative Wireless WOW reciever/headset
-USB Device: Philips SPC1300NC webcam
-USB Device: Griffin RadioShark
-USB Device: Logitech G13 controller
-USB Device: Saitek Eclipse keyboard
-USB Device: Logitech G9x Laser mouse
-OS: Windows 7 x64 w/ all updates
Main System Notes: Program Files, Program Files (x86), ProgramData, Users folders moved off SSD using these instructions http://tuts4tech.net/2009/08/05/windows-7-move-the-users-and-program-files-directories-to-a-different-partition/ with additional changes made for a 64 bit OS. All overclocking was turned off for the testing of this pedal and bios reset to safe defaults except for some hard drive parameters as I use ACPI as well as the JMB36x in port multiplier mode. In addition all programs were checked as up to date using Secunia PSI.
Alternate System Configuration:
OEM Product Name: Dell XPS M1710
-Motherboard: M1710
-Processor: Intel Core2 Duo T7600
-Memory: 4GB Kingston
-CPU Cooler: OEM M1710
-Hard Drive:
-GPU: Nvidia Geforce GO 7950 GTX
-Sound Card: onboard High Definition Audio Device
-Optical Drive: DVD+-RW
-PSU: OEM M1710
-Case: OEM M1710
-Display: 17' 1920x1200 LCD
-OS: Windows Vista x32 w/ all updates
Alternate System Notes: System motherboard and GPU replaced as part of Nvidia Class action lawsuit settlement
The Product, Pricing, and Packaging
You can currently get this pedal for $101.04 plus $10.93 shipping and handling for a total of $111.97. This item is available directly from Delcom.
http://www.delcomproducts.com/productdetails.asp?productnum=903603-5M
Inside the box you'll find the pedals themselves, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, which is in turn inside of bubble wrap. Also you'll find your invoice, and a glossy brochure card.
The pedals are about 12.25 inches in length
The pedals are about 5.25 inches in width
The pedals are about 1.25 inches in height
The pedals have a rubberized backing on the bottom which is textured to keep the pedals from sliding around too much.
Product Specifications
The pedals measure 12.25' x 5.25' x 1.25'. The pedals are composed mostly of metal except for the pedal switches themselves. I've seen other pedals made almost entirely of cheap plastic of that feel like they could break at any moment, and they have. This is not the case with the Delcom pedals they have a very solid feel to them. You could probably fend off a zombie or two with these pedals. The pedals weigh 2 lbs 1 oz or 936 grams by my measurements.
System Requirements:
-Windows XP 32 or 64 bit
-Windows Vista 32 or 64 bit
-Windows 7 32 or 64 bit
-Mac OS 32 or 64 bit
-WinCE
-an open usb port
Installation
I tried out the pedals on both the main and alternate systems above and both win 7 and Vista detected and installed the correct drivers for the pedals. The pedals are identified as a USB IO Controller. There is no disk in the packaging the program to make the pedals work has to be downloaded from the Delcom site.
http://www.delcomproducts.com/productdetails.asp?ProductNum=890600
Software
After downloading the FootCtrl 2.2 software from Delcom's site you are greeted with the following.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3JpqUs6G7s
After clicking OK you'll need to choose the device type, and click Apply&Save. In my case it was a G2 product. It should then list the serial number for your device to the right of the foot switch present checkbox.
Since the FootCtrl supports having multiple pedal sets you can further identify which pedal set the FootCtrl software is responding to by either specifying the device number or serial number of the pedal to respond to. If you leave both of those at 0 it will respond to any pedals present. The device number is actually the USB port the pedals are attached to and this is determined in the order in which the USB bus enumerated the devices. In my case it was it was port 1. If you choose a port at which there are no pedals present or specify a pedal serial number which is not present on your system your pedals serial number to the right of the 'foot switch present' check box will disappear and the check box itself will be unchecked after you hit apply button. You can set the polling rate for the pedals from 10 milliseconds and upwards, with the default being 50 milliseconds. The lower the polling rate the more the chance for erroneous input feedback, the higher the polling rate the higher the chance for missing input feedback. The FootCtrl software needs to be started with a command line option to load different .dat profiles for each set of pedals if you are going to be using multiple pedal sets. You will therefore have multiple instances of the FootCtrl software running each using a different .dat configuration file.The FootCtrl software may need to be run as an administrator to work with some programs(games), but you can configure it even if it is not. As such if you are using it for those programs your better off manually starting it after the system has booted, because it won't run if you've set the program to always run as an administrator, or you've set the shortcut in your startup folder to run as an administrator. At least that is true if UAC is enabled on your operating system. You have to hit the terminate button to exit the program, as exiting it on the screen simply sends it to the tray This is not configurable. You can press H or press the help button to go to the help screen but to be honest it is not much help...it's more of a revision history. You can also have the FootCtrl software run up to two external commands. Any command that would work from the command line will work here. Each pedal press and release can actually perform two separate actions one on the pedal press and one on the pedal release. There is documentation for the FootCtrl software available in PDF format from Delcom's site that is pretty thorough even though it hasn't been updated in a while.(2006). The FootCtrl software seems to work pretty well. Delcom also provides DLL files and example source code in multiple programming languages, so if your a programmer you can write programs that interact with the pedals using those DLL files. You may encounter issues if you use these pedals for gaming however, as I'll delve into below.
First Use and Impressions
Each of the pedals has about an inch gap in between them so even with shoes on you don't really accidentally tap a pedal. In addition to that the pedals have about a quarter inch of movement, and what feels like a couple of pounds of pressure required to activate the pedal. When activated the pedal makes a distinctive click. Some other multi-switch pedals on the market only allow you activate one at a time. The Delcom pedals do not have this problem, and all three pedals can be activated at the same time to perform three different actions simultaneously. You can set the pedals to either emulate one of three mouse buttons or you can have them emulate the keyboard. Getting the pedals working for windows programs other than games went without a hitch for the most part, but you should be aware of a few gotchas before laying your money down.
Compatability
I did have some issues with the pedals behaving in an unexpected fashion. The pedals seemed to work great with windows programs. The only real issue I encountered with windows programs outside of games is that I could not get the actions assigned to the pedals through the FootCtrl software to repeat when the pedal is held down. So for example if you assign a pedal to emulate the J key holding it down will not cause it to repeat. If you're planning to use these pedals for functions that require key repetition you may have issues. The uses that come to mind are if you are using the pedals to scrub back and forth in video or music editing. Games are what I bought the pedals for mainly so it makes sense that this was my focus. To put it plainly there are a lot of games that just DON'T work with these pedals, and a few that do. I'm left to speculate to the cause. I'll go over everything I tried to get them to work properly in the bottom line section. The problems you'll encounter with the non-working games are that when you set the pedals to emulate key board keys the game will recognize the input as something other key than what it was programmed to emulate. The pedal will either work once(as the incorrect key) and stop working until you alt+tab out and back in or it will act like the button is being held down. The non-working games all recognize the programmed pedals as the same incorrect key press. The only difference in the non-working games was that some games could recognize more types of input than others. For example when going through testing all of the possible keys one of the keys is recognized as 'Prev Track' by Stalker Call of Pripyat. Most other games would not recognize this key which is usually just a key for controlling music or video playback software from multimedia keyboards. On some of the non-working games that had a console hitting a pedal would again show the wrong key that would repeat indefinitely until you alt+tabbed out and back in again. Some of the non-working games recognized the input from the pedals correctly in the console but not when binding keys to actions. These games were Crysis, Crysis 2, Portal 2, Left for Dead 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, When trying to set controls in the non-working games some games would recognize the pedal input once(as the wrong key), and would then refuse to recognize that pedal input again until you alt+tabbed out and back in. Some games would recognize the pedal input as the wrong key, and you would then be unable to assign any other keys in the game because the input was repeating so that trying to bind any other action would be assigned to that repeating incorrect key from the pedal. There was one key that always worked when bound. That key was the K key it worked regardless of what pedal it was assigned to in all games. It might also be mentioned that when emulating mouse keys the pedals worked in all games. I just really really did not want to have to reprogram all of my G13 and G9x Logitech profiles for games to be able to play them. Here is a list of the working and non-working games with these pedals when using keyboard emulation.
NON-WORKING Games
-Crysis
-Crysis 2
-Batman: Arkham Asylum
-Battlefield Bad Company 2
-Dead Space
-Dirt 2
-Fallout 3
-Half Life 2
-Half Life 2: Episode 1
-Half Life 2: Episode 2
-Half Life 2: Lost Coast
-Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
-Left for Dead 2
-Metro 2033
-Portal 2
-Stalker: Call of Pripyat
-Stalker: Clear Sky
Working Games
Alien vs Predator
Bioshock 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer
Call of Duty: Black Ops Singleplayer
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Singleplayer
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2
Some Video of what I'm seeing in affected Games pedals set to emulate J,K,L
Stalker: Call of pripyat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIKj_cp_lE
Crysis 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ZvNN4TNvE
The Bottom Line
I have a hard time recommending these pedals due to the non-repeating key issue, and the key board emulation not functioning correctly in so many games. It saddens me very much to see drivers and software hold back what seem like a very nice piece of hardware. It may just be my two different machines that have this issue. Or the particular set of pedals I received. I just don't think these are hardware issues due to it not working correctly only in specific contexts and across muItiple machines. I tested one working and one nonworking game on the M1710 laptop. Those being Crysis and GTA San Andreas. I observed the same issues as on the main system. So I'm pretty sure that this is not merely a x64 issue. I tried some heavy google foo to try to find a solution but none worked out in the end. I heard some people with similar issues had a piece of a Comcast security suite which was an anti-key logger program(constant guard) had similar issues. I However did not have that piece of software installed. I disconnected my computer from the router, uninstalled all of my security software, and restarted twice but no change in the affected games. I heard some folks had had key loggers installed surreptitiously on their machines, and it had causes similar issues in games. I reinstalled all of my security software, plus a few more and did scans. I found nothing malicious. The closest thing I found to malicious software was a semi-randomly named .sys driver that Daemon tools uses to try to hide itself from game DRM software. Upon uninstalling daemon tools I confirmed that a semi-randomly named .sys file had stopped being created upon each boot. I used the following tools to work my computer over for any security threat: Eset Smart Security, Eset SysInspector, Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, SpyReveal, Sophos anti-rootkit, gmer anti-rootkit, Combofix, VBA32 anti-rootkit, PrevX, and Sanity Check. I heard some people with Saitek keyboards had issues similar to mine in games. I heard some people had problems with windows installing the wrong drivers for other HID devices on the system caused some HID devices to not function correctly. I did a clean reinstall the OS with a basic(non-multimedia) keyboard, a two button usb mouse, and no other USB devices plugged in, I got all the windows updates but did not install any security software. I reimported my steam games, and reinstalled the standalone ones. Same problem, no change of the incorrect behavior in the affected games, so I just went through all the fun that is reinstalling your entire system.
The closest I came to maybe figuring this issue out was I discovered that when the FootCtrl program is loaded up the pedals are no longer recognized by DXDIAG as a directinput device.
While FootCtrl was not running the pedals did show up as a directinput device

so my best guess is that the non-working games use directinput as the means of getting input to bind to game actions and somehow become confused as to what keyboard scan codes are being sent.
Anyway that's my two cents the Delcom pedals are great pedals being held back by some hangups in software. If Delcom can get around to getting the issues covered above fixed I think these pedals would be among the best pedals around. If you can live with the above issues I think you'll find a lot to love in these pedals, and I highly recommend them. If however your a gamer or might be affected by the above issues then buyer beware. If you have anything to suggest as a fix that doesn't involve a complete reinstall please comment. If you spot a typo or something that could be said better please PM me and I'll get it fixed. I'll hold onto these things until the end of this week before I send them back to the manufacturer to give the folks here and maybe the manufacturer a chance to have a say while I still have the pedals. Next up I'll review the Good Work Systems Fragpedal Quad USB Gaming Pedals.