How Rare is an Amiga Cherry Keyboard?

[ChaosLord]

I would say the red key thing is pretty rare if I can't remember it.

I am not saying I never had one with Red key I am just saying I can't remember it if I did.

In any case I am not convinced that ONLY the red key ones had cherry switches.

And in any event I know for sure that other Commodore keyboards had springloaded switches in them.  Whether they are cherry or not doesn't really matter.

All that matters to me is:
Does it have a spring?
Does it work?

I have a bunch of keyboard stuff on order.  I will have a keypuller soon then I can take apart all my old A2000 keyboards and report my findings.

If u want a quality Amiga keyboard you just want any of them that are NOT rubbber dome over membrane.

Any Amiga with NMB Space Invaders switches or Mitsumi switches or Cherry switches will be a great keyboard.

None of my A3000 keyboards was worth a flip.  I mean the keycaps are super high quality, but the switches were just crappy rubberdome over membrane and they broke after some years.  So I have 2 beautiful A3000 keyboards sitting here that are useless.

I might rip out the rubber domes out of one and cut them into O-rings which I can use as crash protectors in my brand new keyboard which Rosewill is on sale for $55.00!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  It has the super awesome Cherry Red switches.  It works on PS/2 and USB.  So if u have a PS/2 adapter for your Amiga, which EVERY Amigan should have, then u just buy this $55.00 keyboard and plug it in and go.  No need to spend your whole life lurking on Ebay.

The switches in the old A2000 keyboards were the very best you get from any Earth based civilization until 1 year ago when these new Cherry Red switches came out.  They don't require as much force to activate.  They r kewl.

Commodore keyboards ruled the Earth from 1981-2011.

But now u can get something a bit better if u want.

[ChaosLord]

"The Cherry G80-0879 and G80-0904 were the first generation of keyboards to ship with the Amiga 2000. It features Cherry MX black switches, and the standard Amiga layout. The keycaps are double-shot  ABS plastic

I would be very surprised if any of my A2000 keyboards were ABS plastic.  They never showed any signs of wear.  No matter how much I abused them.

Amiga 2000 keyboards are Doubleshot I believe.  Because they are smooooooth feeling and sharp looking.  You can't buy a keyboard with doubleshot keys anymore.  They keyboard companies will not let you.  You must track down doubleshot keys separately or hire a plastics company to build them for u for thousands of $$$$

When u ask for smooth keys everyone acts like u r crazy.  They only give u bumpy keys nowadays.

[ChaosLord]

According to EU Law, All old Amigas are milspec because they have lead in their solder.

By decree of the Imperial European Empire, all consumer products must be constructed using self-destructing, defective solder that contains no lead.

Only military hardware and satellites may use solder containing lead, because they don't like it when their $40 million jet or $100 million satellite stops working due to tin whiskers.  Tin whiskers grow 10x to 100x slower when u put lead in the solder.

[ChaosLord]

Yeh, I have two as well. I'd say the NMB space invader keyboard is more rare, but I have five of those so is it that rare after all, or have I just been patient enough when tracking them down? :-)

u guys are hardcore Amiga collectors.  How many u have proves nothing

To a regular guy who wants to buy a specific type of springy keyboard, they are all rare.  Especially A1000 keyboards as there were only 100,000 of them made to begin with and most of those are thrown away now.

Even easier: the Amiga keys are red. No other Amiga keyboard has them in that colour.

http://jope.fi/amiga/amikbd/cherryfull.jpg

But yeah, just looking at that picture, the Cherry keyboard is very distinctive in its looks. The cover isn't properly closed in that pic, hence it looks a bit wonky around the upper row of keys.

That keyboard looks like crap

I don't know that the problem is the case not being closed.  Cherry only makes Cherry Lowrider keycaps.  Their keycaps are only 6mm tall.  Normal keycaps are 12mm.  
I hate Cherry Lowrider keycaps because there is no room to install O-rings or crashpads under there when they are sooo short.

Thanx for posting that pic!
I have never had an Amiga 2000 keyboard that looked like that.  That is wack.  I guess this means all my A2000 keyboards are using Mitsumi switches?

[ChaosLord]

A vast number of games and demos fail with it. 95% of hw-banging games and even more among demos.

There is nothing wrong with letting AmigaOS bootup.

There is nothing wrong with using the OS to read the keyboard.

There is nothing wrong with using the OS to read data from a device. (floppy, hard drive, CD, DVD, whatever).

Commodore made them a great OS and gave it away free with every computer.

If the coder refused to use it then its his own dam fault.

You can always let the OS load and then do a Forbid(); Permit(); around your main loop if you want to "disable" the OS temporarily.

You can temporarily disable the Interrupts too.

There is not much reason to throw the whole entire OS in the garbage when writing a game or Demo.