A8 as PC keyboard?

[+davidcalgary29]

Has anyone made an adapter like this for the A8? I have a 600XL that would be perfect for my workplace PC.

[mimo]

Yes, Tynemouth computers (?) In the UK make one, costs a bloody fortune though especially if you want to add joystick ports

[Mclaneinc]

Just looked and I can't find the Atari 8bit version..Tynemouth software

[+davidcalgary29]

There's a link in that Gizmodo article. I just fired off an e-mail; I'll post the response.

[xrbrevin]

seems an awful waste to condemn a glorious A8 to a life of riff-raff PC servitude... 🤢

[+davidcalgary29]

13 minutes ago, xrbrevin said:

seems an awful waste to condemn a glorious A8 to a life of riff-raff PC servitude... 🤢

Who It'll mean that I can bring my A8 to work and use it for the full day, every day. 

[+Awch]

@davidcalgary29 I'm curious what your hear back from them. I'm looking to do the same thing with a dead 800xl, but for emulation purposes. I'm also looking to solder two 2600-dapters in line with the joystick ports to be able to use controllers. The ports and the keyboard would go to an internally mounted hub for connecting it all to a PC. 

[+Awch]

@davidcalgary29 fyi, this person on Reddit is working on the same idea but using an Arduino. He's making pretty good progress.

[TGB1718]

Don't think it would work very well on an A8, total lack of keys to map to modern PC keyboards,

appreciate you could do most things, but as @xrbrevin said what a waste of a glorious machine.

 

On the other hand, I've got a USB PC keyboard working with my 800 👍 just need to complete

the software in the A8 to recover on a warm start and a few of the more obscure key codes.

[+mytek]

4 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Don't think it would work very well on an A8, total lack of keys to map to modern PC keyboards,

appreciate you could do most things, but as @xrbrevin said what a waste of a glorious machine.

I agree completely. It would seem like a person trying to get the same work done with a broken arm, which wouldn't be very efficient. Now for using an Atari emulator on the PC it does make sense to have a 'real' A8 keyboard.

 

On the other hand when you reverse the situation (PC keyboard on A8) you get a lot more functionality due to having those extra keys and the numeric keypad.

 

4 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

On the other hand, I've got a USB PC keyboard working with my 800 👍 just need to complete

the software in the A8 to recover on a warm start and a few of the more obscure key codes.

Curious as to what you are using to create the bridge.

 

[+davidcalgary29]

4 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Don't think it would work very well on an A8, total lack of keys to map to modern PC keyboards,

appreciate you could do most things, but as @xrbrevin said what a waste of a glorious machine.

 

On the other hand, I've got a USB PC keyboard working with my 800 👍 just need to complete

the software in the A8 to recover on a warm start and a few of the more obscure key codes.

Well I certainly can't disagree with that, but the ideal situation would be to have a modded 600XL (this really wouldn't work with any other A8) used as a PC keyboard during the day...and then revert to its intended purpose at night. Why not have the best of both worlds? And many of my mechanical PS/2 keyboards don't have special keys on them in any case.

[TGB1718]

1 hour ago, mytek said:

Curious as to what you are using to create the bridge.

Using an Arduino Uno with a USB HAT, I'm connecit the keyboard directly to the HAT and

programmed the Arduino to map keystrokes on the USB keyboard to A8 keystrokes.

 

On the A8, I use less than 256 bytes of code to get the keystroke data through joystick port 2

obviously I can't do anything about START,SELECT & OPTION.