Parallel ASCII keyboards

Dave Dunfield wrote: Hmm, most of the ones (internal keyboards) I've seen are dumb - the large number of lines exiting the keyboard are just connected direct to the matrix and the decoding is done by something on the main CPU board (often the CPU itself), so not easily transferrable to another system :( Agreed on the external keyboards with a ribbon cable - but I'm struggling to think of that many systems which used them to be honest. Most micros had integrated keyboards, whilst workstation-class stuff was often pretty proprietary and usually serial. Machines laying somewhere inbetween often seem to just use a serial port and rely on a separate terminal for their input. I was pondering that. More than likely someone on this list has already done exactly that. Speak now. ;-) Quite by chance I found such a thing this morning at: http://www.beyondlogic.org/keyboard/keybrd.htm#1 ... the HC705 IC (not a chip I'm familiar with) used may not have enough ports though if port A needs to be used exclusively by the keyboard (due to high impedance requirements) and port B is only 8 bits and tied up with the ASCII interface (plus the strobe line to the machine needs to go somewhere) I'm sure it'd be dead easy for someone who knows about programming PICs and the like - as I say, I'm sure someone on here's done it even :-) cheers Jules -- (\__/) (='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your (")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.