Vintage Compaq Plus Humor

A Compaq Plus laying around here for several years powered on but had never booted. I connected a Gotek w Flashfloppy to it. The jumpers are set as for any PC and FF.cfg the same.
It will not boot a 1.44mb image of DOS but it DID BOOT a 720K image of the Compaq Setup software from Archive.org.
The funny part? I found out the keyboard is broken.
Foam pads on backorder.
Has anyone successfully substituted a different keyboard for a Compaq? Other creative solutions?

I wouldn't expect an HD drive (with an HD formatted disk) to work on a compaq portable, I don't think the controller supports HD.

The keyboard cable uses a square plug, instead of a round DIN like most XT class keyboards. I think someone suggested at there was a different voltage present too, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I do think there is a post somewhere on this forum where someone made something work though.

EDIT: Here is the forum post I was thinking of: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/compaq-portable-i-corroded-keyboard.57223/

cliffmiller said:

Has anyone successfully substituted a different keyboard for a Compaq? Other creative solutions?

Click to expand...

Now that Texelec has good replacement pads.. Why would you bother other than the cases where the KP is missing. I guess I just accept the terrible Keytronic KB for what it is as I have so many systems that have one.

@jafir is right about the HD floppy support. Youd need a replacement floppy controller if you want HD disks. OR a parallel port replacement like the Backpack 1.44MB floppy drive.