G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)

[Mark J. Blair]

> 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/