Re: Commodore 900 keyboard interface

On 11/30/2014 4:52 PM, Michal Pleban wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Today I hot hold of a Microchip development board populated with a 
> midrange PIC. So I hooked it to the Commodore 900 keyboard port and 
> played with it until I reverse-engineered the keyboard protocol. I am 
> posting it here in case anyone else needs it :-)
>
> The kyeboard connector has the same pinout as Amiga 2000, except the 
> pin that is "n.c." on the A2000 is the /RESET signal (which is needed 
> - see below).
>
> The signals, however, are used differently than on the A2000. In fact, 
> the keyboard interface is crudely constructed with a shift register 
> piggybacked on an IO chip in the C900 as an afterthought - originally 
> they constructed the computer without the keyboard at all (!) so the 
> protocol is quite primitive.
>
> The keyboard clock is driven by the keyboard. The keyboard data is 
> clocked on the negative edge of the clock. A start bit of 1 must be 
> sent first, then 7 bits of the scancode, then a make (0) or break (1) 
> bit.
>
> The scancodes are different than those from the Amiga. They are laid 
> out sequentially following the layout of the keys, so 0x01 = Esc, 0x02 
> = 1, and so on.
>
> The break bit is significant for the Ctrl, Shift and Alt keys. For all 
> the other keys, the break scancodes are ignored by the computer.
>
> There is no special make/break mechanism for Caps Lock as on the 
> Amiga. So the computer and the keyboard must keep track of the Caps 
> Lock state / LED separately. Perhaps the RESET line tells the keyboard 
> that the computer has been reset so it can reset the LED (?).
>
> Most probably there is also no mechanism of transmission 
> resynchronization if some bits are sent incorrectly, such as on the 
> Amiga. Because each transmission must begin with a "1", the keyboard 
> is free to transmit any number of "0" bits before the actual 
> transmission as these will be dutifully ignored by the computer.
>
> So here it is - the Commodore 900 keyboard protocol. Now I can create 
> the AT to C900 adapter :-)
>
> Regards,
> Michau.
>
>
>       Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list
If you'd like some help and can handle C code and AVR uCs, I can send 
you a PS2Encoder, which has the PS/2 code already there, and I think you 
can coax the protocol above out of the built in SPI port (Mode 2 maybe).

Or, if you are just into the code, I got that on my site, it's GPL.

Jim

-- 
Jim Brain
brain@jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com


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