Date: 5 Nov 90 23:29:02 GMT From: noao!ncar!gatech!uflorida!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu!news@arizona.edu (Frank E. Seipel) Subject: Transkey -- IBM keyboard on an 8-bit To: Info-Atari8@naucse.cse.nau.edu {TRANSKEY Hardware Review PRODUCT DESCRIPTION: The main emphasis of this product was to provide a means of utilizing a better quality keyboard with the Atari than the one originally provided. The modification works with the 4oo, 8oo, XL, and XE models. Since IBM style keyboards have become so plentiful and are made in numerous configurations, it was deemed that this would be the keyboard of choice. This gives the added flexibilty of locating the keyboard where you want it, independent of the computer and it's associated peripheral equipment. Also, due to the additional function keys, cursor keys, ect., several new features are provided that could not be implemented by the original Atari keyboards. One of the most interesting of these, is the ability to send out full commands (BASIC & MAC65) with a single keypress. This and many other features will be covered in greater detail a little later on, for now let's look at what TRANSKEY is from a hardware point of view and what is involved in installing it. THE HARDWARE TRANSKEY is a microprocessor based translater board measuring aproximately 2.5 x 3.5 inches and is designed to fit underneath the RF shield on the Atari motherboard. The TRANSKEY board is provided with double sided tape attached to the solder side and is meant to be placed in a location where it can be sandwiched between the shield and the motherboard. The location will vary depending on what model of computer it is installed in. On the 1200XL it will be necessary to either cut the RF shield or not use it, since there is virtually no room underneath it. On the 400/800 & all XL models, the TRANSKEY derives it's main communication and power from the Atari via a small piggy-back board that attaches to TRANSKEY with a ribbon cable. This piggy-back board is designed to be plugged into the socket where POKEY (Atari Part# C012294) would normally reside, with POKEY then plugged into the piggy-back board to complete the installation. On the unsocketed XE series machines, the installation requires soldering directly to the POKEY chip. To fully complete the installation and assuming that one wishes to have START,SELECT,OPTION,RESET available from the remote keyboard, will require the attachment of 4 jumper wires. Three of these wires go to a single chip called CTIA or GTIA (Atari part# C014805) to tap into the option select circuitry. The point where the 4th wire for Reset goes, varies depending on the model of computer. Generally to install these jumpers, it merely requires pulling a chip out of it's socket, inserting the bared end of the jumpers into the appropriate holes in the socket, and then re-inserting the chip that was removed. Of course on the XE series it isn't possible to remove the chips, so these jumpers will have to be soldered in place. With TRANSKEY installed, all normal operations of the Atari are unimpaired, including the use of the stock Atari keyboard. However, with TRANSKEY and an external IBM style keyboard attached, there will no longer be any need to use the stock keyboard except for the following conditions: When Cold-Booting from cassette tape, it will only work by pushing START from the stock keyboard prior to engaging power. On XL/XE machines to disable Basic on Cold-Boot, it will still be necessary to push OPTION on the stock keyboard (See section 'Other Special Keys' page#3 for a way to disable basic after boot-up). The reason for this, is that for the 1st couple seconds after powering up, the IBM style keyboards usually run a self-test which basically doesn't allow for proper recognition of a key pressed during this time. Since the Atari looks for these special key presses to occur very soon after the power is turned on, it will fail to see these with the IBM keyboard and instead just do a normal Cold Start. The IBM keyboard is connected by means of a 5 pin DIN inline jack attached by a small ribbon cable to the TRANSKEY main board. This ribbon can be routed through an existing hole or slot on the computers case, by unplugging it from the Transkey board and then reconnecting it when done. For those of you that prefer to permanently mount this jack, it is available as a chassis style jack with mounting hardware (specify when ordering). FEATURES With either an XL or XE computer, almost full use of all the extra key functions on the IBM keyboard are implemented. This includes single key cursor movement, Home cursor, End of page cursor and Insert/Delete modes. Also a special Cursor Left Page/Right Page is available by pressing Page Up/Page Down respectfully. On a 400/800 machine the page movement functions are not recognized, although everything else is. These functions are directly accessable from the number pad after powering up the system (Default), if you want to use the number pad for number entry, simply press the NUMLOCK key. These functions will still be available, but will now require a Control - Function combination to initiate. If you want to restore the default condition (single keypresses), just press the NUMLOCK key once more (pressing NUMLOCK toggles between the two modes). The Home key has yet another use, when pressed with the Shift key it will both home the cursor and clear the screen. This is the same as Shift - Clear on a stock Atari keyboard. Pressing the Escape key prior to this combination will still print the curved arrow symbol like the stock system. The Insert & Delete keys when pressed with Shift, will perform whole line insertions or deletions. If a 101 key Enhanced keyboard is being used, the extra cursor control, Insert and Delete keys will work the same as their number pad counterparts, unchanged by either Shift, Control or NUMLOCK. Perhaps one of the nicest features, is the indication of CapsLock and NumLock by led indicater lights on IBM style keyboards, that are so equipped. The Function Keys: On an XL or XE series machine Control F1 - F5 will provide the following special functions: Control F1 Disables the keyboard (both stock an external) and until pressed again, all keys will be ignored by the computer. Control F2 Disables DMA. Pressing this will cause the screen to go black until any other key is pressed. While the screen is black, processing time is accelerated by 30%. Control F3 Disables the audible keyboard click when a key is pressed, pressing it again will re-enable the click sound. Control F4 Toggles between International symbols and standard graphics symbols on the screen. Control F5 This acts as the HELP key, since there isn't one on most IBM keyboards. On all other machines 400/800's included, Control F6 acts as the Atari Inverse Video key, Control F7 is the BASIC macro select and Control F8 is the MAC65 macro select. The last two keys (Control F7 & F8) control possibly the most interesting added feature of the new keyboard, it's the ability to send out an entire string of characters with but one signal keystroke (Macros). Built-in to TRANSKEY are two predefined tables of some commonly used commands for either BASIC or MAC65 Assembly languages. These are sent by pressing F1 - F8 and depending upon whether Control F7 or Control F8 was last pressed, will spit out either the BASIC macro or the MAC65 macro (Defaults to BASIC on power-up). Below is a list of the supplied macro commands. MACROS BASIC MAC/65 F1 LIST LIST F2 RUN ASM,#-,#D: F3 SAVE"D: SAVE#D: F4 LOAD"D: LOAD#D: F5 ?PEEK( FIND/ F6 POKE REP/ F7 Backup Backup F8 ?FRE(0) SIZE * F7 = SAVE"D:BACK" in Basic, "SAVE#D:BACK" in MAC/65 Note: stands for Carriage Return, commands with this as a suffix will be executed immediately. F7 is a way to easily save a back-up of whatever you are working on to disk (under the name 'BACK') with a single keystroke. Function keys F9 - F12 (F11 & F12 available on Enhanced keyboards only) are used as option select keys. F9 START F10 SELECT F11 OPTION F12 HELP The ALTERNATE (ALT) key will also function as the OPTION key and the SYSREQ key will also act as a HELP key (as well as Control F5). OTHER SPECIAL KEYS The key with the ($-) and (`) symbols on it (normally on the upper right corner) acts as an extra Escape key, thus placing it where most people are used to it being. Since these symbols are not directly available on the Atari, this key now has a practical use. The key marked PRINT SCREEN (or Shift *) when pressed will output an unused character on the keyboard matrix (Dec #36, HEX $24). This in itself isn't very useful, but with a little ingenuity on the user's part, this key could be looked for and caused to activate a screen printing program. To see this key in action, you could type in: 10 ?PEEK(764):GOTO 10 RUN (or F2). This routine will continuously look for any keypressed and print out it's raw matrix keycode value. The Control SCROLL key combination will actually be recognized as the Break key to the Atari computer (On most 84 key keyboards this key is also labled as break). If Control, ALT and the NumPad DELETE key are pressed together, this will result in a System Reset to occur (assuming the Reset jumper wire was installed). Releasing the DELETE key 1st prior to Control and ALT, will usually result in a re-boot with Basic disabled. Releasing the ALT key 1st prior to DELETE, will result in a normal Reset with Basic enabled. If you are using a BTC series keyboard, the extra key labeled MACRO will produce a simultaneous Shift Control action in combination with any other key pressed. Several programs recognize this as a send macro string function, of course on keyboards without this key, the normal Shift Control combination would be used instead. Keys not utilized are: SCROLL LOCK and the combination PAUSE/BREAK key found only on Enhanced keyboards. SOFTWARE COMPATABILITY TRANSKEY is an external independent device, having it's own processor and memory, and by design is suppose to emulate a piece of hardware (a stock Atari okkeyboard). To the Atari computer, signals coming from TRANSKEY will be indistinguishable from signals that a stock keyboard would produce. This means that any software ever written wil be compatible with the TRANSKEY board, the only exceptions are as follows: When a program such as a wordprocessor looks at keys in an entirely new light and essentially reassigns new meaning to these keys, there could be a conflict. An example would be where the extra symbols on the arrow keys no longer print to screen, but instead are used for moving the cursor to the next word, or the next line, ect.. Since these characters are on entirely different keys on the IBM standard, it will take some getting used to to make the same things occur in a program of this kind. For instance when running from MAC65's DDT menu, to increment or decrement the memory being viewed in the display window requires pressing either the (-) or (=) keys on the upper right of the keyboard. If you tried pressing the up-arrow or down-arrow instead (as the program instructions dictate) nothing will happen, at least not on the IBM keyboard. This way of doing things is rather rare, since most programs will recognize the keys in a more standard fashion. Another side effect of some of the word processing programs, is that many times they are designed to put the system in lower case when first booted up. Since there is no communication of this to the TRANSKEY board, the keyboards CapsLock light will indicate an upper case (or CapsLocked) condition (this is not the case when using a PC/XT keyboard see next section for details). This can usually be easily remedied by pushing the CAPSLOCK key twice which will reinitialize the computer to the keyboard and put the computer in upper case mode. This particular problem can also occur if the CAPS key is pressed on the stock Atari keyboard, but the same fix will also correct this problem. KEYBOARDS TO USE TRANSKEY was designed to be as flexible as possible and because of this, should be compatible with most any IBM PC/XT/AT or 3rd party equivalent keyboard. Best results will usually be obtained by selecting an 'AT' configured (or dipswitch configurable) keyboard instead of the auto-configuring types. Configuring TRANSKEY to the keyboard is extremely easy, all that is required is to plug in the keyboard with the computer off and then simply switch the computer on. TRANSKEY will then perform an analysis of the keyboard attached and auto-configure itself to it. If you have a switchable PC/AT keyboard, be sure to set it's dipswitches to 'AT' mode. This will insure proper setting of the CapsLock light on power up. When using a PC/XT keyboard, TRANSKEY will initialize itself to lower case mode (although the computer will be in upper case, unless a boot-up program has changed the setting). The action of pressing CAPS LOCK would then place the computer positively in an upper case mode and indicate this condition by lighting the CapsLock light. Repeated pressing of this key and the indication of the CapsLock light, would then correspond to the actual case mode of the computer. The reason for this difference between an 'AT' keyboard and a PC/XT keyboard, has to do with who controls the indicater lights. On an 'AT' keyboard the computer is solely responsible for activating or deactivating a given light, on a 3rd party XT keyboard it's the keyboard that controls the action of the lights ( When powering-up it turns all the lights off). Since the Atari normally powers-up in upper case mode, TRANSKEY was designed not to alter this initial setting and if at all possible to reflect this by turning the keyboard CapsLock light on ('AT' keyboards). With a PC/XT keyboard you will still be in upper case mode from the computer's point of view, but the CapsLock light will be off. The state of this light after powering-up, will also act as a good indicater as to what type of keyboard you are using or in what way TRANSKEY has configured itself when used with an Auto configuring keyboard. MICRO SOLUTIONS BOX 750396 Petaluma, CA 94975 (707) 763-9103 Price Listing TK01-SD TRANSKEY BOARD (Solder in Version) $48.00 $(Fits all models 400/800/XL/XE$) TK01-PB TRANSKEY BOARD (Piggy-Back Version) $58.00 $(400/800/XL ONLY solderless installation$)