RickNel
Veteran Member
Next project is to build a fake (AKA simulated) serial data terminal into the shell of a defunct Soroc 135 one-piece terminal that I've had since it was new in 1980.
CRT went stir-crazy in storage and leaked corrosive gel over the logic board. Board might be salvageable, but CRT replacement would be prohibitive. So no Plan A.
Plan B is to use the guts and screen of an old laptop, installed in the shell, to boot from CF/SD card straight into a DOS-based ANSI serial terminal emulator, tricked up to look like the Soroc screen.
Plan C might be to construct a ROM-based software terminal to run on some generic platform like a PC motherboard, Raspberry Pi or similar.
Whichever platform, I'll need to map the Soroc's surviving keyboard to a modern keyboard controller of some sort. Essentially, I have a robust mechanical keyboard switch matrix of 8 x 16, terminating on a 24-pin header. Plan is to wire those 24 pins to the 24 equivalent row/column numbered address lines on an Intel controller cannibalised from a PS/2 standard keyboard.
Every returned code will then need to be re-mapped in software to AT standard, to give correct ANSI input.
Current plan is to boot DOS 6.22 with ansi.sys, then have autoexec.bat run the series of ansi.sys commands to re-map each key individually.
A couple of questions on this.
1. Is there a way to construct and invoke a custom keyboard layout in DOS without having to run 80+ individual key re-map commands in ansi.sys?
2. Many/most of the de-bounce capacitors on the Soroc keyboard seem to have decayed. Can they be bypassed for a "modern" keyboard controller, or do I really need to replace them?
Rick
CRT went stir-crazy in storage and leaked corrosive gel over the logic board. Board might be salvageable, but CRT replacement would be prohibitive. So no Plan A.
Plan B is to use the guts and screen of an old laptop, installed in the shell, to boot from CF/SD card straight into a DOS-based ANSI serial terminal emulator, tricked up to look like the Soroc screen.
Plan C might be to construct a ROM-based software terminal to run on some generic platform like a PC motherboard, Raspberry Pi or similar.
Whichever platform, I'll need to map the Soroc's surviving keyboard to a modern keyboard controller of some sort. Essentially, I have a robust mechanical keyboard switch matrix of 8 x 16, terminating on a 24-pin header. Plan is to wire those 24 pins to the 24 equivalent row/column numbered address lines on an Intel controller cannibalised from a PS/2 standard keyboard.
Every returned code will then need to be re-mapped in software to AT standard, to give correct ANSI input.
Current plan is to boot DOS 6.22 with ansi.sys, then have autoexec.bat run the series of ansi.sys commands to re-map each key individually.
A couple of questions on this.
1. Is there a way to construct and invoke a custom keyboard layout in DOS without having to run 80+ individual key re-map commands in ansi.sys?
2. Many/most of the de-bounce capacitors on the Soroc keyboard seem to have decayed. Can they be bypassed for a "modern" keyboard controller, or do I really need to replace them?
Rick