| I played at interfacing an LK201 to my old Atari 800 a few years ago.
Still have the keyboard (bought legally through employee purchase,
even) sitting in the basement next to all sorts of other unfinished
projects.
It really isn't too tough from a hardware standpoint if you want to
burn off a serial port: It has a four wire connection through which
you feed some voltage (an amp of 5V, I think), a ground, and transmit
and receive data. Actually, the voltage above may be wrong. Can't
remember if it was 5V or 12V or whatever. I suppose if it's 5V, it
would probably require RS232 level conversion. Like I said, it's been
so long since I did it, I can't really remember the details.
Anyway, I did have it hooked up to the serial port on my Atari once,
and was successfully (and easily) reading characters from it. It uses
a 4800 baud asynchronous protocol, and when you get right down to it,
if you like the defaults that the keyboard initializes with, there
isn't a whole lot you have to send to it. It takes care of autorepeat
and keyclick itself, although you can send a whole raft of commands to
it to reconfigure it.
The way key presses come in doesn't seem to be much different than the
way the Amiga's keyboard works, although I'd say it's a safe bet that
it wouldn't simply be a matter of a different keymap file.
I'd see two major pieces of work in interfacing one to the Amiga:
Faking the signals out so you can plug it into the normal keyboard's
jack, and re-doing the appropriate parts of the keyboard driver
software to make it all transparent. If you were equally proficient at
hardware and software, I'd expect the second task to be the more time
consuming of the two.
|
|
More details on the keyboard hacking needed. What is the cpu in
the Amiga keyboard?
<<< BOLT::MAY14$DUA1:[NOTES$LIBRARY]ATARIST.NOTE;1 >>>
-< Atari's 68000 based systems. >-
================================================================================
Note 236.11 Another keyboard for the 1040 ???? 11 of 14
MUNICH::REINHOLD 41 lines 8-FEB-1989 02:56
-< LK201 - more information >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some detailed information.
As I mentioned in .8, the converter is a peace of harware,
which replaces the original ATARI keyboard.
It can also be used with a switch to work with the original
keyboard or with the LK201.
The converter is based on the same micro as the original
keyboard - Hitachi 6301V or 6303R. I have extracted
the code from the ATARI keyboard and disassembled it.
This was easy - but to understand the code was terrible.
Then I have replaced all ATARI keyboard specific code with
new code which handles the LK201.
These is a simplified block diagram of the converter.
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+
| | | | | |
RX from ATARI-----| 6 | | EPROM | | UART +------ RX from LK201
| 3 +----+ +----+ |
TX to ATARI ------| 0 +-++-+ 8K +----+ +------ TX to LK201
| 3 | || | | | |
| R | || | | | |
| | || | | | |
+-------+ || +-------+ +-------+
||
+---++---+
| Mouse/ |<---
| JOY |<---
+--------+
Reinhold.
|