[Coco] Coco Digest, Vol 153, Issue 65

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Aug 25, 2015, at 22:17 , Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
> 
> Here's another cool idea but maybe it's too complicated.  What if you design a keyboard with a CPLD (or FPGA) which can perfectly emulate a CoCo keyboard and all of the keycaps match exactly what is on the CoCo keyboard.  The CPLD isn't necessarily needed because everything matches the CoCo but we include it anyway and it emulates it anyway. Then, for the non-purists who would rather just have a PC style layout they buy different keycaps for the 2,6,7,8,9 0, -,=, etc. keys and they flip a little DIP switch on the keyboard and away they go!  The CPLD knows to perform the translation albeit not perfect and everybody's happy.

Let me make a counter-proposal: Why not design a CPLD/FPGA/micro based translator that connects inline between a dumb keyboard and the CoCo motherboard? Then the smart keyboard capabilities could be used with original CoCo keyboards, too. Granted, you can't just pop off a CoCo 1 chiclet key to replace it with a different one, but you could still have programmable macros. Somebody could put labels on top of their remapped keys if they want. Or they could just ignore the markings, just like I ignore the markings of the control and caps-lock keys (whose functions I swapped) on my Macs. BTW, that confuses the heck out of any visitors to my keyboard... :)

Back in the day, I had some sort of software-based keyboard smartener for my CoCo 1. It added all sorts of fancy special functions. I don't remember what it was called or even most of what it did, but I recall that it had a light blue keyboard overlay that had all of the fancy functions printed on it. A hardware keyboard-smartener might be able to do similar fancy stuff without any software overhead on the CoCo.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/