fseipel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Frank E. Seipel) (11/06/90)
{TRANSKEY
Hardware Review
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. The
modification works with the 4oo, 8oo, XL, and XE models.
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 MAC/65
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 Backup Backup
F8 ?FRE(0) <CR> SIZE <CR>
* F7 = SAVE"D:BACK" in Basic, "SAVE#D:BACK" in MAC/65
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
okkeyboard). 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 wil 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.
MICRO SOLUTIONS
BOX 750396
Petaluma, CA 94975
(707) 763-9103
Price Listing
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 $(400/800/XL ONLY solderless
installation$)rrwood@contact.uucp (roy wood) (11/06/90)
Thanks to everyone who replied to my request for information about the Transkey keyboard. One person I spoke to told me that there's a problem with the Transkey board: if you type too quickly, characters are skipped or missed. The person who told me this doesn't actually own one of the boards, so this is simply hearsay. Does anyone out there actually own one of these boards? And if so, could you please tell me what problems you've had with it? -Roy Wood
kimes@cbnewsc.att.com (Kit Kimes) (11/08/90)
From article <1990Nov6.120127.559@contact.uucp>, by rrwood@contact.uucp (roy wood): > > Thanks to everyone who replied to my request for information about the > Transkey keyboard. > > One person I spoke to told me that there's a problem with the Transkey board: > if you type too quickly, characters are skipped or missed. The person who > told me this doesn't actually own one of the boards, so this is simply > hearsay. Does anyone out there actually own one of these boards? And if > so, could you please tell me what problems you've had with it? The latest issue of STart magazine (which now incorporates an 8bit section) has a fairly long review of the TRANSKEY that is written by Matt Ratcliff, so I tend to trust his judgement. He gave it a very positive review. He did say (and I quote) "The only flaw I discovered with the Transkey is the keyboard 'roll-over' feature; it's too sluggish. When typing on the PC keyboard and Transkey, I must slow my typing noticably, as compared to my average typing speed on an IBM PC system. This takes a minor bit of getting adjusted to, and will probably only be noticed by fast touch typist. It is still far more responsive than the original Atari 800XL keyboard." He didn't explain what was meant by keyboard roll-over or if typing too fast caused you to loose letters. It does sound though like the average user would see a big improvement. I have a hard time getting much typing speed on my 800XL because the springs are so stiff. I am typing on it now and this message is starting to bother me. Hope this helps. He did mention that with the cost of IBM compatible keyboards being so low, you can get set up for about $100. The Transkey is $48 for the solder in version and $58 for the plug in version. Don't spend the extra $10 unless you have a computer with sockets in it. Kit Kimes AT&T Bell Labs Naperville, IL ...!att!iwtsa!kimes