Atari ST keyboard USB converter [TMK based]

[adamkov]

Hi,

I'm a new member here, but a long time reader and I wanted to give back to the community.

A kind friend of mine gave me a Atari ST keyboard. I fell in love with it and wanted to use it on my PC.
I dug through Atari docs for keyboard protocol and made/coded a USB converter based on TMK and ProMicro.

https://github.com/adamkovesdi/tmk_keyb ... /atari_usb

This is a working alpha version, during initialization phase after plugging in the keyboard, one needs to wait a few seconds to get a reliable operation. In the future I may work on it for improving this behavior.

This is an action shot of the keyboard, rocking as an input device for a C64 emulator at a retro gaming party.

[adamkov]

[placeholder]

[Findecanor]

Cool! That's the keyboard with Cherry switches, right?

The keyboard should have two joystick ports at the back. Too bad that TMK doesn't have gamepad/joystick support, but that should be possible to add.

[adamkov]

Thanks. Indeed MX Blacks, nice linear switches.

[adamkov]

BTW decoding the joystick events are not harder than the keystroke events. In fact it's very simple.
Implementing joy support into TMK and towards the host is the hard part.

[matt3o]

arduino stack supports mouse/joystick and all. if you don't mind losing TMK flexibility you could use that. I've build a keyboard out of it, it's not as fun as TMK but it totally works

[adamkov]

arduino stack supports mouse/joystick and all. if you don't mind losing TMK flexibility you could use that. I've build a keyboard out of it, it's not as fun as TMK but it totally works

Perhaps that's a job for someone interested in the joysticks.
Repurposing the connection code, one can work out the bits for the joys. They report events in a very similar way like the keypresses.

I love TMK and lack the resources to rewrite the keyboard code from scratch unfortunately.

[Findecanor]

A silly thing with TMK is that it has multiple USB "back-ends", and if one would add USB joystick support, the proper way would be to do it multiple times: once for each back-end.
I have written my own joystick adaptor with my own USB backend (patterned after PJRC's), so maybe I could at least add it to the LUFA backend that you are using.

[Bikerbob]

I posted in the workshop forum.. but I am working on the same keyboard.. but for use with my ST>. I need to figure out how to come up with the stabilizer wire for the spacebar.. much wider than a standard bar. Any ideas?

James

[Bikerbob]

BTW adamkov thats a mega ST keyboard and very valuable in the ST community if your ever looking to sell

[adamkov]

BTW adamkov thats a mega ST keyboard and very valuable in the ST community if your ever looking to sell

Thanks for the feedback Bikerbob. No plans on selling it as it was a present from a good friend.
But now I feel smart about making the converter plug into the original socket even though I had to source the proper RJ12 connector for it. This way I could preserve the keyboard in it's very original form.

[dev-null-74]

Hi,

thank you for your converter! It's a very cool idea!

I have also a Mega ST Keyboard and I want to use it with a Atari ST Emulator.

I was able to compile your converter and running it on a Arduino Micro (based on a ATmega32U4 microcontroller).
Unfortunately the converter is not running stable. Somtimes I get no characters. It seems that a external power supply helps but don't solve the problem.

How can I debug what happens if keystrokes don't generate characters?

Best Regards