13 Sep
2016
13 Sep
'16
9:25 a.m.
On Sep 13, 2016, at 09:16, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
Unfortunately, the guys building new Cherry keyboards fabricate new keytops for
Windows extended keyboards, and not ASCII (ie. VT-100 style) or ANSI (VT-220 style)
so unless you want to spring the cash to have 500 sets of keytops made, you can't
even make a practical replacement.
I've investigated making a custom mechanical keyboard upgrade for my old TRS-80 Color
Computers. Custom printing on Cherry MX keycaps is available and somewhat practical for
one-off keyboards. The limitation is that you're stuck with the keycap widths
available in each row of a sculpted Windows-like keyboard. In the case of the CoCo
keyboard I contemplated, I could not exactly match the widths of all of the non-1x1 key
caps of the original keyboard, but I was able to come up with an alternate layout that I
think would have been serviceable.
If you are not opposed to making a custom PCB to stuff with Cherry MX keyswitches, then
you have a lot of freedom. Not full freedom due to limitations of available widths in
each row, but still quite a bit.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/