A500 keyboard problem ...

[nickoteen]

Greetz from Croatia ...
 
There's a certain problem with my A500 keyboard and I was wandering if you guys could help me out ... set me on the right track or something.
 
The details:
 
Amiga works fine. Games load correctly, workbench loads correctly, my mouse, joysticks etc. all work just fine, except the keyboard. And by that I mean just my main set of keys (numeric part of the keyboard works just fine). When I press any of the keys (using CLI or Deluxe Paint for example), the key either presents nothing on the screen or it presents some weird (ascii i guess) character which most certainly is not the character printed od the keyboard key.
 
Now, the Amiga was a present and behaves like that from the moment I got it, which was a few months ago, and I believe there something wrong with the keyboard, the keyboard controller or something else.
 
But, is it possible that it's just me, not familiar enough with the platform and that this behaviour is normal because I failed to do something (set the correct keyboard layout, code page, or something else that's more related to software and/or configuration of the machine rather than a hardware failure.)
 
Any help greatly appreciated.

[nickoteen]

Deluxe Paint is loaded from wb. The keys seem allright, no sticky/stuck keys as far as I can see. The connections from the keyboard to the motheboard seem allright as well, but then I'm no electronic engineer so I can't tell for sure. The capslock (red light) turns on/off without a problem. I should also mention the fact that WB disks are originals and came without a read / write protection "cap", so it's imposible to write on them.
 
I guess it must be a HW problem then. Bummer.

[nickoteen]

Here's what I've discovered:
 
When I load Xcopy from it's own disk, then format another disk, Xcopy asks for a disk name to be enterd in a designated name field. I tried all the keys on a keyboard and they all work just fine. I was able to output every keyboard character on the screen which menas the keyboard is not broken at all. The question, why is it behaving like described earlier inside workbench is a mistery to me. Could it be a virus, or some wb preferences/configuration I don't know how to setup perhaps ?

[nickoteen]

Will try. Thnx 4 the tip.

[nickoteen]

Hm. Amiga is German, WB is UK. But, is it possible that some portion of rom was flashed with some codepage settings which are making problems now. But then again, in xcopy everything works fine.
 
One other thing. I've set up the time and date settings to current (it was June 1st, 1978 when I loaded wb for the 1st time). Amiga was powered off for a few days and when I turned it on, loaded wb, it displayed the correct time and date. How ? It must have saved those settings somewhere in rom, I guess. If that's the case, then maybe some settings regarding keyboard layout/character set must reside inside rom as well. Right ? I'm so unfamiliar with the platform, so I have to ask.

[nickoteen]

Pozdrav !
I rouled out hardware malfunction of any kind, because as I stated earlier, in xcopy, when i have to enter a name for a newly formatted disk, my keyboard works perfectly. It's a WB thing, I think. Haven't tried to CTRL+D it during boot process yet, but I will as suggested earlier.

[nickoteen]

Well, if this one isn't for ag. Mulder and Scully ... I've found out what's wrong with my keyboard. Ok, maybe I haven't FOUND OUT what's wrong with my keyboard, but what I realised was when I loose up a few screws on the back of the left side of the keyboard, the damn thing works normal. I tried 3 different WB disks, CTRL+D it into shell, nothing helped. A few months of mind phu%ing and three loose screws later, it finally works ! And if you ask me how come it worked in xcopy (every god damn time), I'll direct you to the paranormal investigators mentioned above. Thanks every1 for doing your best and trying to help.