emjej@uokvax.UUCP (12/15/83)
#N:uokvax:3500021:000:820 uokvax!emjej Dec 13 20:02:00 1983 Has anyone worked on, or heard of, a hack to attach a real keyboard (i.e. one that hands you an 8-bit byte, or perhaps 7-bit ASCII--I'm not picky) to the PIA that the current CoCo keyboard is hooked up to? This would entail rewriting the POLCAT routine for Color BASIC and a piece of OS-9 (dunno when the keyboard is polled, every clock tick maybe?), and would have the following advantages: 1. It would make considerably less work for the 6809 for keyboard input. 2. It would free up one side of a PIA currently used to feed probes through the array of switches hooked up to the other side of the PIA which is then used to puzzle out the precise switch (key) pressed. This PIA port would seem to be a nice thing to hang a printer off of, and a PIA device driver already exists for OS-9. James Jones