Kaypro 10 Finnish/Swedish character ROM

[1541]

Hi, here is one ROM dump that is missing on the Internet. Kaypro 10 Finnish/Swedish character generator replaces the bitmaps for special characters ] } [ { \ | with letters Å å Ä ä Ö ö. The keyboard firmware is not changed, instead the wiring of the keyboard switches has been modified with cut traces and jumper wires.

It is possible that this ROM is also used on other computer models from Kaypro.

This picture shows how the places and the markings of the keycaps have been changed for localization purposes.


View attachment Kaypro_10_Finnish_and_Swedish_character_generator_from_TMS2732_EPROM_in_location_U26.zip

 

[Lawrence Woodman]

I'm always interested when I see support for character sets out side of standard ASCII on CP/M. I guess users had to get used to typing two of the accented characters when needing the [ ] pair used as a command line option with some commands, but other than that did the key replacements cause many other problems for Finnish/Swedish language users?

 

[1541]

This replacement of characters in the 7-bit ASCII set is most annoying for programmers. I would guess that many who wrote source code made the character set configurable with an external switch if they had access to an EPROM burner.

Any screen output that uses those six replaced characters looks weird.

On the Kaypro keyboard the new location of colon mark is inconvenient because it is to the right of the shift key.

 

[Lawrence Woodman]

The colon position shouldn't surprise me, Kaypro had a thing about odd key placements such as the CTRL key to the left of the caps lock, which is a pain for Wordstar keys in particular.

 

[Robbbert]

Thanks 1541 for that.