Herb Peyerl wrote:
> 
> This is cool guys! How difficult do we think it's going to be to make X
> play nice with the apollo keyboards?  Personally, I prefer the apollo
> keyboards over the HP ones with the "weird" <esc> location (amongst
> other things)... out of the 8 or so HP's that I have that I regularly
> use, only one (lager) has a comfortable keyboard.

Um, should be pretty trivial, unless X's keyboard input parser is 
incredibly hairy.  As I understand it, it consumes scancodes and
generates key events; I have at various stages of development had
an open/read interface on the apkbd driver I'm working on that
disgorged scancodes (and a subdevice that did the same with 
mouse packets), and I have a complete mapping of the Apollo keyboard (as
Michael J said, start at 01 at the top left and count across and down; 
talk about commonsense 8).

If you want to take the keyboard side, I'll go straight for getting
my hires colour Apollo video card working under X.  I don't think 
I'd survive for long on the Hyperion 8)

Right now, I'm trying to take Jason's bootstrap interface model and
make it work with the "real" ite.  I'm still a little confused
about what-goes-where, but I figure if I get something out tonight
then I can bask in the merciless humour tomorrow morning.
 
> Now, given that only 2 of my HP's even have Apollo keyboard ports, how much
> additional work would it be to attach a keyboard at say "dca0" or "dcm0"?
> It looks as though, with some minor wiring, one could be hooked up to a
> serial port fairly easily with the addition of a 12v power-pack...

Hanging one off dca0 would be pretty easy, as it's an 8250 UART as well.
I was _going_ to go the way the sparc kiddies do and layer the keyboard
on top of the apci driver (which is languishing but basically working), 
but I couldn't wrap my brain around making it work at boot-console time.
As for the dcm; dunno, it looks like it might be a bit tougher.
 
> ok, so call me a hack...

No, that's one of the joys of serial-interface keyboards; I'm just
talking with someone that wants a type-5 Sun keyboard on their
PC about the same sort of stuff.

--
Mike Smith  *BSD hack  Unix hardware collector
The question "why are the fundamental laws of nature mathematical"
invites the trivial response "because we define as fundamental those
laws which are mathematical".  Paul Davies, _The_Mind_of_God_