[Coco] keyboard

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:19 AM 12/8/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>Mark
>I do love my COCO in all versions. Once upon a time I wanted
>to build my own small development system computer based on a
>6809 processor. To do this today seems to be a waste of time
>because the coco's allready are a complete system so what i
>would like to do instead is to use a coco but with slight
>modifications so that I can use it for a developement system.
>I was not trying to suggest that cloud 9 do this but was
>looking for assistance to do it myself. The only thing that I
>dont like about it is that darn keyboard. If i cant serial
>cable a coco keyboard i will do one of three things;
>1 use it as is.
>2 hack up a parallel ext cable
>3 buy cloud 9's AT adapter
>I really did not want to go to the expense of a really nice
>keyboard for just a development system. For my repacked coco3
>thats ok though.


I butchered a PC keyboard years ago that required hundreds of traces to be 
cut and some wires to be soldered to create the CoCo's keyboard 
matrix.  This project wore me out, but I ended up with a nice keyboard for 
my tower repack.

I also have a very nice LK-201 keyboard that I have used from Disk BASIC 
using my own code.  This project required me to convert a DC Modem Pak into 
the input device that takes the LK's 4-pin serial output and sends it into 
the 6551.  The BPS is 4800.  The keyboard is programmable and has a lot of 
neat features.

I tried on many occasion to find a way to get OS-9 to use my LK-201 
keyboard instead of the CoCo keyboard.  I figure... OS-9.. come on, it can 
deal with all sorts of serial devices, especially if it's 6551-based.  To 
OS-9, it would be talking to a /t2 device.  In fact, I set up an LK-201 
device driver and descriptor which did work, but I could never get the 
shell to use the keyboard.  Redirecting the stdin/stdout never worked.

Boisy, if you know how to get NitrOS-9 to use a different keyboard for all 
functions throughout the system, please let me know.  It would need to be 
global to the system, so that any code that calls the keyboard polling 
routine would end up receiving from the LK-201, like code from 1981. :)