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Keyboard

R

rowdy235

Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2008
Messages
15
Hey guys, looking to attach a keyboard to my commodore C386SX-LT. I have one COM port on it and one printer port. My question is, is there any way to get a keyboard to attach to either of these ports? If the Com port, I also need a way to split it to mouse.

Thanks
 
Don't know about your particular setup, but with normal DOS and Windows systems you could plug in a serial keyboard and use either a wedge to redirect it to the keyboard or the WIN tools to do the same. Trouble is, the mouse would use the same port...
 
I have a built-in modem I am removing and replacing with another COM port. I just didn't know there was such a thing as a serial keyboard. Please enlighten me.
 
DOS does give you a certain limited functionality with the CTTY command. Basically, you can do CTTY COM1: and DOS will read from the comm port for input.

But there are gotchas.

The first one is that it's only good with programs that use DOS functions (e.g. 1, 6 and 10) for input. Programs using the BIOS calls won't work--and there are a lot of those.

The second is that no scan codes are returned and you don't get cursor or function key control. DOS expects a dumb ASCII TTY-type input.

But if you really want to take a PC keyboard and have it output ASCII codes over a serial link, I'm sure that I've seen a PIC project to do just that.

You could also write your own TSR/driver to simulate a PC keyboard from ASCII input and patch the INT 16H vector to your BIOS.

Just tossing some ideas out....
 
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