A1200 Keyboard to PS/2 or other interface..

[kolla]

@Kolla, Plz produce a clear picture with A1200 keyboard and Keyrah wired together in the same picture of suitable pixel size..

I can do that next week when I'm home from holidays (only brought the minimig with me). In the meantime, you  can enjoy this..


The connector for the A1200/A600 ribbon cable are the stripes in the upper left of the board.

[delshay]

@delshay, Where do you connect the A500 keyboard to the A1200 ?

i will have to map it out what i did,everything works. the only problem is the @ key is now above the 2 key,so i have to use shift/2 key to get @ symbol other than that everything works including reset.

i have a extra A500 keyboard socket interface under the floppy drive so i can plug-in any A500 keyboard direct.

[mongo]

From the testing I've done, jamming a PS2 adapter on the end doesn't work and I'm sure I recall Jens (the designer) saying a PS2 adapter wouldn't work.  Considering the Keyrah has an On/Off switch I suspect it is a power issue.

It has nothing to do with power. PS2 adapters don't actually do anything but adapt the plug. For a keyboard to work with one it has to support the PS2 protocol and the Keyrah doesn't.

[DrDekker]

Just to expend on Kolla...
 
The Keyrah is a piece of hardware that takes the ribbon from the A1200 keyboard and allows the Amiga keyboard to work on a PC which is really useful for emulation packages like WinUAE (Amiga Forever), Fellow, etc. Best of all, it also has 2 joystick ports built in for attaching your old "Atari" style controllers. If you look a couple of post up you'll see a picture of an open A1200 case (mobo gone) and the Keyrah sitting in the top right-hand corner.
 
From the testing I've done, jamming a PS2 adapter on the end doesn't work and I'm sure I recall Jens (the designer) saying a PS2 adapter wouldn't work. Considering the Keyrah has an On/Off switch I suspect it is a power issue.

Aha!!! (in the style of Alan Partridge)
 
Thanks for the explanation Darrin - now I know. (cue penny dropping - down the grid as usual).
 
So basically, it's the Keyrah that doesn't support the PS2 protocol?
 
But why would anyone want to use a creaky old amiga keyboard instead of a really nice Microsoft/Logitech one?

[psxphill]

@psxphill, Why is the A500 MCU better than the A1200 one ?

The MCU in the A1200 has trouble with multiple keys pressed at the same time. No idea why.

[Daedalus]

I'm not sure that's a limitation of the MCU in the 1200 - I always thought it was down to the design of the keyboard matrix in the 1200. It's manufactured totally differently from the A500 and big box Amiga keyboards, so it could've just been a shoddy design which confuses different combinations.

[freqmax]

Which a NEW software can reduce the effects off..

[kolla]

But why would anyone want to use a creaky old amiga keyboard instead of a really nice Microsoft/Logitech one?

Because some of us grew up with those "creaky old" amiga keyboards and do not find anything "nice" about the microsoft/logitech ones?

For example I pretty much _need_ to have the ctrl on the correct location. On the Minimig that means I have to hack the minimig code myself to map ctrl to capslock for every release, for MorphOS Tokai's been kind enough to build caps2ctrl functionality into nocapslock. For OS4 I don't even know if there is a solution for this. For Linux, *BSD, Windows etc there is no problem, as remapping keys on keyboards is rather trivial.

Besides, this discussion started with people wanting to build FPGAArcade into old A1200/A600 cases, using the "native" keyboard.