On 2016-09-13 12:25 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
On Sep 13, 2016, at 09:16, Al Kossow <a...@bitsavers.org> wrote:
Unfortunately, the guys building new Cherry keyboards fabricate new keytops for
Windows extended keyboards, and not ASCII (ie. VT-100 style) or ANSI (VT-220
style)
so unless you want to spring the cash to have 500 sets of keytops made, you
can't
even make a practical replacement.
I've investigated making a custom mechanical keyboard upgrade for my old TRS-80
Color Computers. Custom printing on Cherry MX keycaps is available and somewhat
practical for one-off keyboards. The limitation is that you're stuck with the
keycap widths available in each row of a sculpted Windows-like keyboard. In the
case of the CoCo keyboard I contemplated, I could not exactly match the widths
of all of the non-1x1 key caps of the original keyboard, but I was able to come
up with an alternate layout that I think would have been serviceable.
If you are not opposed to making a custom PCB to stuff with Cherry MX
keyswitches, then you have a lot of freedom. Not full freedom due to
limitations of available widths in each row, but still quite a bit.
Maybe you can get some ideas from this (somewhat tasteless) project?
https://hackaday.io/project/13210-the-fsociety-keyboard
--Toby
