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Post by dshadoff on Mar 31, 2024 23:45:39 GMT
It's been a while since I posted something here... I probably have a few projects that I need to post. I just created a repository with lots of information about the unreleased PC Engine keyboard device, here: github.com/pce-devel/PCE_KeyboardI got some of my information (and at least one of the pictures) from Chris Covell, so thanks Chris !!
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Post by sparkz on Apr 1, 2024 2:37:51 GMT
Awesome! Minor nitpick: the PC keyboard layout. You can see one here www.modelfkeyboards.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/DSC_5708.jpg . As far as I know it was standardized in the late 80's with the PS/2. Aside from that, are you going to be looking into documenting how the modem worked? Being able to emulate that (or even spoof some modem communication "standard" with modern hardware) could open up some really neat software possibilities, maybe even self-hosted software development.
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Post by dshadoff on Apr 1, 2024 13:11:08 GMT
Hmmm.. Keyboards are constantly changing in subtle ways, and the PC Engine’s Tshuushin keyboard was several years behind the times for choosing a PC-88 keyboard as its basis…Which would be similar to choosing a PC XT keyboard here instead of a PC AT keyboard at that time. But really my point was to say that shift-2 was once for quotation mark here (before IBM changed the layout), and still is a quotation mark on Japanese keyboards (along with several other keys affected by this layout change).
Anyway, the first step was the keyboard. New software can be written to use that. Maybe a Wordle game or something to start.
The modem unit and Tsuushin software also expects a non-volatile block of memory to exist (but no such hardware exists, and emulators don’t support this at this time). Getting that enabled would allows use of the non-communication parts of the software, such as the BASIC processor and sprite and character design parts.
The communications part also might be interesting, but needs to be reverse-engineered how it works and a whole different way of communications would need to exist since nobody uses modems like this anymore (and most people don’t even use land lines).
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Post by sparkz on Apr 1, 2024 16:18:45 GMT
Well the modem bit isn't too bad if the protocol it wants can be reverse engineered. Tons of people have projects for turning dial-up connections into ethernet using the gpio pins on a raspberry pi or similar.
With nonvolatile memory as a requirement for basic, maybe they were thinking along those lines already. I'm guessing that'd want a floppy peripheral that never got made or something? I can't imagine bram would've been viable at the time.
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Post by dshadoff on Apr 2, 2024 0:43:10 GMT
The non-volatile memory was just battery-backed. Since it was only 32KB, they seem to hav ebeen expcecting for people to send and recieve programs from each other or BBS systems. Hard to say exactly, since that part of the software hasn't been explored (because the modem chips they used aren't well-documented with datasheets).
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