Transkey
From: Michael Current (aa700@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Date: 04/21/92-07:49:36 PM Z
From: aa700@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Michael Current)
Subject: Transkey
Date: Tue Apr 21 19:49:36 1992
Reprinted from the A.C.E.C. BBS (614)-471-8559
T R A N S K E Y
BY: MICRO SOLUTIONS
FOR THE ATARI 400/800/XE/XL SERIES
- Revised 4/6/90 -
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:
The main emphasis of this product, was to provide a means of utilizing
a better quality keyboard with the Atari than the one originally provided.
Since IBM style keyboards have become so plentiful and are made in
numerous configurations, it was deemed that this would be the keyboard of
choice. This gives the added flexibilty of locating the keyboard where you
want it, independent of the computer and it's associated peripheral
equipment. Also, due to the additional function keys, cursor keys, ect.,
several new features are provided that could not be implemented by the
original Atari keyboards. One of the most interesting of these, is the
ability to send out full commands (BASIC & MAC65) with a single keypress.
This and many other features will be covered in greater detail a little
later on, for now let's look at what TRANSKEY is from a hardware point of
view and what is involved in installing it.
THE HARDWARE
TRANSKEY is a microprocessor based translater board measuring
aproximately 2.5 x 3.5 inches and is designed to fit underneath the RF
shield on the Atari motherboard. The TRANSKEY board is provided with double
sided tape attached to the solder side and is meant to be placed in a
location where it can be sandwiched between the shield and the motherboard.
The location will vary depending on what model of computer it is installed
in. On the 1200XL it will be necessary to either cut the RF shield or not
use it, since there is virtually no room underneath it.
On the 400/800 & all XL models, the TRANSKEY derives it's main
communication and power from the Atari via a small piggy-back board that
attaches to TRANSKEY with a ribbon cable. This piggy-back board is designed
to be plugged into the socket where POKEY (Atari Part# C012294) would
normally reside, with POKEY then plugged into the piggy-back board to
complete the installation. On the unsocketed XE series machines, the
installation requires soldering directly to the POKEY chip.
To fully complete the installation and assuming that one wishes to have
START,SELECT,OPTION,RESET available from the remote keyboard, will require
the attachment of 4 jumper wires. Three of these wires go to a single chip
called CTIA or GTIA (Atari part# C014805) to tap into the option select
circuitry. The point where the 4th wire for Reset goes, varies depending on
the model of computer. Generally to install these jumpers, it merely
requires pulling a chip out of it's socket, inserting the bared end of the
jumpers into the appropriate holes in the socket, and then re-inserting the
chip that was removed. Of course on the XE series it isn't possible to
remove the chips, so these jumpers will have to be soldered in place.
With TRANSKEY installed, all normal operations of the Atari are
unimpaired, including the use of the stock Atari keyboard. However, with
TRANSKEY and an external IBM style keyboard attached, there will no longer
be any need to use the stock keyboard except for the following conditions:
When Cold-Booting from cassette tape, it will only work by pushing
START from the stock keyboard prior to engaging power.
On XL/XE machines to disable Basic on Cold-Boot, it will still be
necessary to push OPTION on the stock keyboard (See section 'Other Special
Keys' page#3 for a way to disable basic after boot-up).
The reason for this, is that for the 1st couple seconds after powering
up, the IBM style keyboards usually run a self-test which basically doesn't
allow for proper recognition of a key pressed during this time. Since the
Atari looks for these special key presses to occur very soon after the
power is turned on, it will fail to see these with the IBM keyboard and
instead just do a normal Cold Start.
The IBM keyboard is connected by means of a 5 pin DIN inline jack
attached by a small ribbon cable to the TRANSKEY main board. This ribbon
can be routed through an existing hole or slot on the computers case, by
unplugging it from the Transkey board and then reconnecting it when done.
For those of you that prefer to permanently mount this jack, it is
available as a chassis style jack with mounting hardware (specify when
ordering).
FEATURES
With either an XL or XE computer, almost full use of all the extra key
functions on the IBM keyboard are implemented. This includes single key
cursor movement, Home cursor, End of page cursor and Insert/Delete modes.
Also a special Cursor Left Page/Right Page is available by pressing Page
Up/Page Down respectfully. On a 400/800 machine the page movement functions
are not recognized, although everything else is.
These functions are directly accessable from the number pad after
powering up the system (Default), if you want to use the number pad for
number entry, simply press the NUMLOCK key. These functions will still be
available, but will now require a Control - Function combination to
initiate. If you want to restore the default condition (single keypresses),
just press the NUMLOCK key once more (pressing NUMLOCK toggles between the
two modes).
The Home key has yet another use, when pressed with the Shift key it
will both home the cursor and clear the screen. This is the same as Shift -
Clear on a stock Atari keyboard. Pressing the Escape key prior to this
combination will still print the curved arrow symbol like the stock
system.
The Insert & Delete keys when pressed with Shift, will perform whole
line insertions or deletions.
If a 101 key Enhanced keyboard is being used, the extra cursor control,
Insert and Delete keys will work the same as their number pad counterparts,
unchanged by either Shift, Control or NUMLOCK.
Perhaps one of the nicest features, is the indication of CapsLock and
NumLock by led indicater lights on IBM style keyboards, that are so
equipped.
The Function Keys:
On an XL or XE series machine Control F1 - F5 will provide the
following special functions:
Control F1 Disables the keyboard (both stock an
external) and until pressed again, all
keys will be ignored by the computer.
Control F2 Disables DMA. Pressing this will cause
the screen to go black until any other
key is pressed. While the screen is
black, processing time is accelerated
by 30%.
Control F3 Disables the audible keyboard click
when a key is pressed, pressing it
again will re-enable the click sound.
Control F4 Toggles between International symbols
and standard graphics symbols on the
screen.
Control F5 This acts as the HELP key, since there
isn't one on most IBM keyboards.
On all other machines 400/800's included, Control F6 acts as the Atari
Inverse Video key, Control F7 is the BASIC macro select and Control F8 is
the MAC65 macro select.
The last two keys (Control F7 & F8) control possibly the most
interesting added feature of the new keyboard, it's the ability to send out
an entire string of characters with but one signal keystroke (Macros).
Built-in to TRANSKEY are two predefined tables of some commonly used
commands for either BASIC or MAC65 Assembly languages. These are sent by
pressing F1 - F8 and depending upon whether Control F7 or Control F8 was
last pressed, will spit out either the BASIC macro or the MAC65 macro
(Defaults to BASIC on power-up). Below is a list of the supplied macro
commands.
--- MACROS ---
BASIC MAC65
F1 LIST <CR> LIST <CR>
F2 RUN <CR> ASM,#-,#D:
F3 SAVE"D: SAVE#D:
F4 LOAD"D: LOAD#D:
F5 ?PEEK( FIND/
F6 POKE REP/
F7 SAVE"D:BACK <CR> SAVE#D:BACK <CR>
F8 ?FRE(0) <CR> SIZE <CR>
Note: <CR> stands for Carriage Return, commands with this as a suffix
will be executed immediately. F7 is a way to easily save a back-up of
whatever you are working on to disk (under the name 'BACK') with a single
keystroke.
Function keys F9 - F12 (F11 & F12 available on Enhanced keyboards only)
are used as option select keys.
F9 = START F10 = SELECT F11 = OPTION F12 = HELP
The ALTERNATE (ALT) key will also function as the OPTION key and the
SYSREQ key will also act as a HELP key (as well as Control F5).
OTHER SPECIAL KEYS
The key with the ($-) and (`) symbols on it (normally on the upper right
corner) acts as an extra Escape key, thus placing it where most people are
used to it being. Since these symbols are not directly available on the
Atari, this key now has a practical use.
The key marked PRINT SCREEN (or Shift *) when pressed will output an
unused character on the keyboard matrix (Dec #36, HEX $24). This in itself
isn't very useful, but with a little ingenuity on the user's part, this key
could be looked for and caused to activate a screen printing program. To
see this key in action, you could type in: 10 ?PEEK(764):GOTO 10 <CR> RUN
<CR> (or F2). This routine will continuously look for any keypressed and
print out it's raw matrix keycode value.
The Control SCROLL key combination will actually be recognized as the
Break key to the Atari computer (On most 84 key keyboards this key is also
labled as break).
If Control, ALT and the NumPad DELETE key are pressed together, this
will result in a System Reset to occur (assuming the Reset jumper wire was
installed). Releasing the DELETE key 1st prior to Control and ALT, will
usually result in a re-boot with Basic disabled. Releasing the ALT key 1st
prior to DELETE, will result in a normal Reset with Basic enabled.
If you are using a BTC series keyboard, the extra key labeled MACRO
will produce a simultaneous Shift Control action in combination with any
other key pressed. Several programs recognize this as a send macro string
function, of course on keyboards without this key, the normal Shift Control
combination would be used instead.
Keys not utilized are: SCROLL LOCK and the combination PAUSE/BREAK key
found only on Enhanced keyboards.
SOFTWARE COMPATABILITY
TRANSKEY is an external independent device, having it's own processor
and memory, and by design is suppose to emulate a piece of hardware (a
stock Atari keyboard). To the Atari computer, signals coming from TRANSKEY
will be indistinguishable from signals that a stock keyboard would produce.
This means that any software ever written will be compatible with the
TRANSKEY board, the only exceptions are as follows:
When a program such as a wordprocessor looks at keys in an entirely new
light and essentially reassigns new meaning to these keys, there could be a
conflict. An example would be where the extra symbols on the arrow keys no
longer print to screen, but instead are used for moving the cursor to the
next word, or the next line, ect.. Since these characters are on entirely
different keys on the IBM standard, it will take some getting used to to
make the same things occur in a program of this kind. For instance when
running from MAC65's DDT menu, to increment or decrement the memory being
viewed in the display window requires pressing either the (-) or (=) keys
on the upper right of the keyboard. If you tried pressing the up-arrow or
down-arrow instead (as the program instructions dictate) nothing will
happen, at least not on the IBM keyboard. This way of doing things is
rather rare, since most programs will recognize the keys in a more standard
fashion.
Another side effect of some of the word processing programs, is that
many times they are designed to put the system in lower case when first
booted up. Since there is no communication of this to the TRANSKEY board,
the keyboards CapsLock light will indicate an upper case (or CapsLocked)
condition (this is not the case when using a PC/XT keyboard see next
section for details). This can usually be easily remedied by pushing the
CAPSLOCK key twice which will reinitialize the computer to the keyboard and
put the computer in upper case mode. This particular problem can also occur
if the CAPS key is pressed on the stock Atari keyboard, but the same fix
will also correct this problem.
KEYBOARDS TO USE
TRANSKEY was designed to be as flexible as possible and because of
this, should be compatible with most any IBM PC/XT/AT or 3rd party
equivalent keyboard. Best results will usually be obtained by selecting an
'AT' configured (or dipswitch configurable) keyboard instead of the
auto-configuring types.
Configuring TRANSKEY to the keyboard is extremely easy, all that is
required is to plug in the keyboard with the computer off and then simply
switch the computer on. TRANSKEY will then perform an analysis of the
keyboard attached and auto-configure itself to it. If you have a switchable
PC/AT keyboard, be sure to set it's dipswitches to 'AT' mode. This will
insure proper setting of the CapsLock light on power up. When using a PC/XT
keyboard, TRANSKEY will initialize itself to lower case mode (although the
computer will be in upper case, unless a boot-up program has changed the
setting). The action of pressing CAPS LOCK would then place the computer
positively in an upper case mode and indicate this condition by lighting
the CapsLock light. Repeated pressing of this key and the indication of the
CapsLock light, would then correspond to the actual case mode of the
computer.
The reason for this difference between an 'AT' keyboard and a PC/XT
keyboard, has to do with who controls the indicater lights. On an 'AT'
keyboard the computer is solely responsible for activating or deactivating
a given light, on a 3rd party XT keyboard it's the keyboard that controls
the action of the lights ( When powering-up it turns all the lights off).
Since the Atari normally powers-up in upper case mode, TRANSKEY was
designed not to alter this initial setting and if at all possible to
reflect this by turning the keyboard CapsLock light on ('AT' keyboards).
With a PC/XT keyboard you will still be in upper case mode from the
computer's point of view, but the CapsLock light will be off. The state of
this light after powering-up, will also act as a good indicater as to what
type of keyboard you are using or in what way TRANSKEY has configured
itself when used with an Auto configuring keyboard.
The following list is of keyboards that have been tested with TRANSKEY
and are known to work reliably.
IBM BTC KEYTRONICS MITSUMI
PC/XT/AT 53-SERIES EP3435XTAT KPQ-E99YC
TELEVIDEO QUADRANT EPC
113110 AT AT SK88018-1U
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
* * * O R D E R F O R M * * *
MICRO SOLUTIONS
BOX 750396, Petaluma, CA 94975 (707) 763-9103
Name ____________________________ Address________________________________
City ____________________________ State ____________ Zip ________________
____ TK01-SD TRANSKEY BOARD (Solder in Version) $48.00
$(Fits all models 400/800/XL/XE$)
____ TK01-PB TRANSKEY BOARD (Piggy-Back Version) $58.00
$(400/800/XL ONLY solderless installation$)
____ CHASSIS MOUNTABLE JACK SUBTOTAL ______
California residents ADD 6.25% SALES TAX ______
SHIPPING and HANDLING $ 3.00
MONEY ORDER or CERTIFIED CHECK enclosed for: ______
(TO BE MADE OUT TO: MICRO SOLUTIONS)
***** Please allow 3-4 weeks for delivery *****
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Michael Current, Cleveland Free-Net 8-bit Atari SIGOp -->> go atari8 <<--
The Cleveland Free-Net Atari SIG is the Central Atari Information Network
Internet: currentm@carleton.edu / UUCP: ...!umn-cs!ccnfld!currentm
BITNET: currentm%carleton.edu@{interbit} / Cleveland Free-Net: aa700
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