So obviously I’ve not been making much progress on my Retrochallenge entry this month. I’m still of the opinion that January is a bad month for me to be doing this! I’m due in the Isle of Man at the end of the month, Alex is in Panto all this week, there just aren’t enough hours in the day!However, I have had a chance to get a PS/2 to USB adapter working and programmed for the LK450. This is a keyboard designed by DEC to provide a VMS layout for use both on their Alphastation/Alphaserver range but also specifically to support remote access to VMS systems via PCs.

Traditionally there have been a couple of terminal emulators that have supported the keyboard, notably Reflection which runs under Windows. However, since Windows 7 the support for the LK450 has been dropped. The custom keyboard driver doesn’t work any more and I’ve been forced when using my desktop to use a cobbled-together mix of Reflection and Hummingbird Exceed to get a fully mapped set of keys.

However, all this only worked on a PC with a native PS/2 port. All the standard USB to PS/2 converters didn’t provide codes for any of the keyboard-specific keys which left me stumped, until I came across Soarer’s converter. This is a piece of software that runs on a specific subset of Arduino controllers (typically Teensy) and provides a comprehensive, programmable solution to the problem of getting a PS/2 based keyboard talking to a PC via the USB port. It also supports a range of other input protocols, such as IBM Terminal keyboards and more recently Wyse keyboards.

Windows, although it has very poor keyboard support in my humble opinion, does support function keys above F12 and this is the solution that I have employed. There is an option in Reflection to use a Japanese LK keyboard variant and using this I was able to map all the keys. Well I say all, there is always one fly in the ointment whenever dealing with DEC keyboard in my experience. The ESC key is mapped internally to both PF1 and ESC keys when running in DEC mode (which is the mode I require to map all keys). This isn’t a big deal for VMS as traditionally ESC isn’t well support in standard software (although Emacs/VMS users would instantly disagree).

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ve also hopefully sourced an elusive Cherry G80-1306HAD/01 which is a keyboard Cherry made using the original DEC keyboard protocol, so can be attached to VAXstations and the like.