[Coco] Mechanical keyboard upgrades for the CoCo

[Bill Loguidice]

I'm a huge fan of mechanical keyboards and use them on my modern computers
whenever possible, but I don't see how it would be financially practical to
create anything resembling a drop-in replacement for the CoCo. I'm also not
aware of such a feat being accomplished for any other vintage computer in
our modern era, although replacement keyboards are being devised for the
C-64 and Amiga 1200 (albeit not mechanical, merely modern replacements for
the original designs; those communities are much larger as well, so the
economies of scale work in their favor, which is why they're getting a lot
of things (modern recreations of the motherboards, new cases, etc.) that
those in the CoCo community are still aspiring to).

I imagine the most practical solution is the aforementioned PS/2 interface
(USB would be preferred, of course, since today's mechanical keyboards are
mostly USB-based), but that's obviously a bit of an inelegant solution,
though of course has the advantages of being mostly future (and breakage)
proof, fairly straightforward, and relatively inexpensive.

With the above in mind, I wonder if taking something like the Vengeance K65
keyboard (
http://www.corsair.com/en-us/vengeance-k65-compact-mechanical-gaming-keyboard),
which is about as compact as mechanical keyboards get (~6.5x14in.; although
I don't recall the dimensions of the CoCo case), and figuring a way to
securely and somewhat cleanly mount that on top of the CoCo case (removing
the old keyboard, etc.) and using an appropriate adapter (it helps it has a
removable cable), would be a sufficient compromise between using an
external keyboard or creating a true replacement? Probably not.

-Bill

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc.
<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
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