| I once had this same idea, except that a different home computer
was involved. Working in the CSC gave me access to all sorts of
maintenance documents that I no longer have handy. I did find the
document that you were looking for once, and even xeroxed a few
pages.
I may be able to find those xeroxed pages and forward them on to
you, but I'll start here with what I know about the keyboard. First,
I'll say that with some work, I did have an LK-201 plugged into
my computer, and I had a Basic program that was reliably translating
the stuff that it got.
The keyboard itself is connected via a four wire circuit to the
terminal. The wires (forgetting the color code) are ground, +12V,
receive data, transmit data. When they say +12V, they're talking
about a whole bunch of current (I believe 1 amp), so I don't think
you'd want to try drawing it off one of the amiga's ports. I just
built a +12V regulated power supply from Radio Shack parts (they
even sell the regulator in a bubble pack).
Moving on from there, the data leads send and receive at 4800 baud,
using traditional 8 bit bytes, framed with one start and one stop
bit. So, you can use a pretty generic UART chip to communicate
with the device. It does use normal EIA levels, as I recall, rather
than TTL levels, as I require having to throw some level conversion
at it as well.
The actual data transmitted is pretty similar to the raw keycodes
that you get from the Amiga's keyboard. Without being an expert
on the Amiga's keyboard, and forgetting much of what I knew about
the LK-201, I will also say that the LK-201 is a bit more flexible.
You can program what keys do what, repeat rate, keyclick volume,
etc.
All in all, once you've got the hardware out of the way, the actual
key translation is pretty straight forward, and not very different
from the Amiga's.
fyi: We purchased our LK-201 through the employee purchase plan
about 3 years ago. It was a pretty easy thing to order: We just
ordered a VT-220 country kit, which simply consists of the keyboard
and power cord for the terminal (no terminal). At the time, this
country kit cost $200, so it cost us $100 after the employee discount.
I mention this just to point out that obtaining a non-pilfered LK-201
is quite easy, and doesn't necessarily involve buying a terminal
or PC.
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| Another way to get a "full" keyboard for the Amiga 1000 is to buy an Amiga
2000 keyboard when they become available. The Commodore hardware people
on Usenet have said that an Amiga 1000 keyboard will plug into a Amiga 2000
with only a connector change, I would hazard a guess that the reverse is
true as well.
I would expect that there would be no software changes needed. I haven't
heard anything about different versions of 1.2 being used for the 500 and
2000 versus the 1000.
Of course, getting a spare keyboard for a machine that is only currently
being sold in Europe may be a bit hard.
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| I've sometimes been thinking about this too.
The old Professional-350 technical reference manual has a rather
detailed description of the LK-201. To me, it seemed rather
complicated, but then again, I know nothing about the Amiga keyboard.
I guess one of the main things is (if you want to use the Amiga
KB port) whether the speed is the same (or settable)? Everything
else should be doable with little (?) HW or SW hacks...
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