Re: PS-2 Keyboard for Aplle II ?

["David Wilson" <mcs6502@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> While the Apple main board takes care of the $C010 keyboard strobe, the
> keyboard adapter/encoder must supply a "new key down" strobe in addition
> to the 7-bit ASCII.  This will do it for a ][ or ][+.

The PS/2 adapter for the Replica-1 will do for this.

> For the //e, it is trickier, since the //e keyboard connector interface
> is an unencoded keyswitch matrix plus a few unmatrixed keyswitches.  It
> would be trickier to emulate such a keyboard with a microcontroller,
> since it would have to sync with the main board encoder scan.

My design idea for this is a PCB which plugs into the AY-3600 and 2316
keyboard ROM sockets and relocates these two chips to this PCB. A PIC
or other suitable micro accepts data from both a PS/2 keyboard and the
AY-3600 and drives the address pins of the keyboard ROM and the AKD and
KSTRB pins on the AY-3600 motherboard socket.

This way both keyboards can be used. I wonder if all four of the IIe
motherboards (beige NTSC, PAL and platinum NTSC and international NTSC)
have the AY-3600 & keyboard ROM sockets identically spaced - if not the
board would have to plug into the ROM socket via a ribbon cable.