• Custom Keyboard Rabbit Hole

    Like many people, I had seen wild crazy looking mechanical keyboards, and had been both fascinated and confused by them. How could you get by with so few keys? What does each key actually do? They looked like some kind of wild alien input device, but, at the same time, must work well otherwise the […]

  • Retro Challenge 2017/4 – Keyboard Investigations

    After a visual check of the keyboards (see this post), I had a couple of questions, which were do the keyboards work? and how do the keyboards work? On the basis that neither of the Alphameric had their EPROM windows covered, and that one of the Cherry keyboards had already been modified, I chose the […]

  • Retro Challenge 2017/4 – The Key(board) to Happiness

    Next up on the things to investigate is the 4 keyboards Judging by the connectors, it was obvious that these aren’t modern (PS2, USB or even 5 pin DIN) keyboards.  Likely either a raw matrix or maybe parallel ASCII.  Lets open them up and have a poke around!