Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM!jrd From: jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM (John R. Dunning) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit Subject: Re: Alternate keypads Message-ID: <19880417184118.1.JRD@MOA.SCRC.Symbolics.COM> Date: 17 Apr 88 18:41:00 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 48 Date: 13 Apr 88 23:45:40 GMT From: bsu-cs!cfchiesa@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Christopher Chiesa) In article <1017@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU>, gdtltr@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Gary D Duzan) writes: > > ... A number of programs these days are > starting to use shift-control sequences (I know of > PaperClip and the Express! terminal programs). ... add Kermit65 to the list... :-) Also the X-Lent word processor pgm. > it would be neat to have an alternate keyboard that has > these keys as seperate function keys. ... [details omitted for brevity] This is indeed a good, and in fact somewhat workable, idea. The only limitation I see is that NOT ALL shift-control key combinations actually seem to generate hardware codes. (I may be mistaken. I know that not all SH-CTL combinations result in a character code reaching RAM shadow location 764 (decimal; hex 2FC), but it may be present in the hardware register whose location escapes me just now...) No, you're not mistaken, at least about the symptom. I've never gotten to the bottom of the root cause, either, but my guess is that the real low-level key-scanning logic gets confused by some combinations of c-sh- things, and concludes that there was really no keypress. Esp given that the the nonfunctional keys are in sort of a regular pattern, that seems more likely than that somebody actually filtered them out in the interrupt-level software. Anyway, within that limitation, you should be able to do whatever you want with these key combinations, but some keyboard patterns may get bollixed if there's a "dead" key in the middle of it. True, but it's worse than just holes. As I recall, you lose Tab thru 'R', and 'H' thru '|', ie there are two substantial horizontal chunks taken out of the keyboard. That makes it real tough to do, say, a fake VT100 keypad. I know, as I tried real hard to get that to work when I did the last version of Kermit65. Just be aware of this, and you should be "golden!". I sent mail last summer about the problem, but didn't get any feedback about any workarounds. Anybody got any better ideas these days?