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Jartza / PS2toAmiga

Simple ATTiny85 based PS/2 to Amiga protocol converter that fits inside the keyboard.
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
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Question about PS2toAmiga #2

Closed slappy32 closed 1 year ago

slappy32 commented 1 year ago

Hello there, your PS2 to Amiga looks interesting. Can you also make it work in the opposite direction, so that you can connect an Amiga keyboard to a PS/2 port?

I own an A1200 in a tower upgrade kit by Mikronik. Back in the 90's that company installed an internal PS/2 keyboard interface (= PS/2 port at the back of the tower.) The original A1200 keyboard went into an external chassis that contained an internal adapter to turn the A1200 into a PS/2 keyboard, while the reset function "Ctrl + leftA + rightA" had been preserved. But that Mikronik keyboard interface is not the best one, translates only one key-press at a time. And the keys of my A1200 KB have gotten an ugly shade of yellow. Now I would like to connect one of those nice, rare and black CDTV keyboards to the PS/2 port of my tower and need to convert the Amiga keyboard protocol accordingly. And I can only find some adapters online that convert Amiga keyboards to USB - but my PS/2 port won't understand USB-protocol jsut using one of those cheap USB-to-PS/2 plugs in green or violet.

Further questions:

  1. If it is possible to make your adapter work from Amiga keyboard to PS/2 could you do so and offer me one ready to use for a good price? b) Or at least provide the PCB, that special IC chip flashed with your programm readily, and provide some short step-by-step
    soldering instructions?

Hope you can help a little. Greetings, slappy32

Jartza commented 1 year ago

Hi. Sorry for delay in answering, I had muted the issues-emails for some reason and only noticed this.

The answer to question is: unfortunately no, it's not easy nor feasible to use this for other-way communication. The PS2 keyboard -reader is using ready library (PS2KeyAdvanced) and the Amiga-side is write-only, implemented as bitbanging protocol. It would require full rewrite of the firmware, and I only wrote this for my own needs to connect a small PS2-keyboard to my Amiga CD32.