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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Computolio on April 04, 2004, 04:07:24 AM

Title: Replacing an Amiga 1000 keyboard
Post by: Computolio on April 04, 2004, 04:07:24 AM

    Over a year ago, I found an Amiga 1000 in someone's curbside trash. Upon getting it home, I discovered that the disk drive was broken. I've replaced the disk drive just recently, and I've been able to get it to boot up just fine now.

    There's only one problem- upon reaching the Workbench for the first time, I discovered that the keyboard was broken. Several keys were not responding, so I decided to open it up. Simply put, it's impossible to fix; the switches are all embedded in this giant, useless piece of metal and there's no way to reach the contacts without desoldering every switch from the underlying circuit board. To make matters worse, I also managed to break said underlying circuit board when I was looking for a way to get that metal frame off. Yeah, I'm an idiot.

    The next thing I tried was hooking up a keyboard from a dead Amiga 500 I had. (For the curious, this is the same machine where I got the replacement disk drive from.) I could've sworn the keyboard worked, but when I tried to hook it into the 1000 (making sure to get the 5V, CLK, DATA and GND wires right) nothing happened.

    Has anyone gotten an A500 keyboard to work with an A1000? If not, where (besides eBay) can I get a replacement keyboard? Are keyboards from the Amiga 2000/3000/4000 (should I find one) guaranteed to work if I hook them up properly?

Title: Re: Replacing an Amiga 1000 keyboard
Post by: on April 04, 2004, 06:53:13 AM

I have an old A1000 keyboard with some missing pieces. If you'd like to try and take two partials and make one whole, let me know. Don't know if this one works at all, when I came across it sme keys had already been desoldered, and I took a few keycaps to complete my good keyboard... You're welcome to what's left of it for free.

There may also be a way to hack an adaptor to fit an A2000/3000/4000 keyboard to the phone wire connector, but I don't know the pinouts to match things up with. Maybe aminet has something?

Title: Re: Replacing an Amiga 1000 keyboard
Post by: Computolio on April 04, 2004, 07:59:52 AM

    Thank you kindly for the offer.

    I tried hooking up the keyboard again and it worked! Turns out that I had the pinout BACKWARDS. Oops.

    How should I house the A500 keyboard? Will an A2000 keyboard case work? Anyone have a dead Amiga 2000 keyboard?