MICROPENDIUM Microreviews for January 1996 by Charles Good ---------------- AT KEYBOARD INTERFACE by Western Horizon Technologies. An immediately obvious disadvantage of the 99/4A is its small keyboard with relatively few keys and no numeric keypad. Several years ago RAVE offered a full sized keyboard replacement. You removed the 99/4As keyboard, installed the RAVE interface in its place, and pluged the RAVE keyboard into the interface. I bought one of these in 1988. I think it cost me $200 and I didn't like it. The non standard 105 key RAVE keyboard had some strangely labeled keys I never used, felt mushy. The keyboard eventually became mechanically unsound and new replacement 105 key keyboards were unobtainable. RAVE also offered an XT keyboard interface without a keyboard, but it was also expensive ($150) and so were XT keyboards. Times and prices have have changed. The RAVE 105 key keyboard with interface and the RAVE XT interface are no longer in production and XT keyboards are hard to find in stores and catalogs. On the other hand AT 101 key keyboards are now readily available and very inexpensive. You can get a new AT keyboard for $14 plus shipping from the MEI/Microcenter catalog (product #027615, phone 800-634-3478). My local WalMart store has them starting at $20. I recently purchased at WalMart for $30 a "mechanical" AT keyboard with an audible click and nice tactile feel. And most importantly for 99/4A users you can now purchase for $65 (+ $5 shipping) an AT keyboard interface Western Horizon Technologies that is better than the RAVE product and costs much less. This W.H.T. internal console circuit board allows you to attach any AT keyboard to the side of your console and use either the AT keyboard or your console's keyboard. Any computer keyboard will eventually develop mechanical problems, so the common availability of inexpensive replacement AT keyboards is an important consideration. With this console modification you always have the option of using your console keyboard as you normally do. You can also plug in an AT keyboard and then use either or both the console or AT keyboard. You will be tempted to figure out a way of hiding your console on the floor, in a drawer, behind something (out of sight out of mind) and just use the AT keyboard. The AT keyboard's long coiled cord can reach to your console's hiding place. There are unfortunately times when you must still use the console keyboard, so don't bury the console too deeply. As originally designed, installation of the AT keyboard interface was supposed to be user friendly. Essentially all you supposidly had to do was cut one console motherboard trace with a sharp knife, make one solder connection, and without soldering fit the springy prongs of the AT interface circuit board over the the pins of the 9900 chip on the mother board. Disassemble the console, cut a trace, solder one wire, press on the interface, route the keyboard jack to your preferred location on the side of the console, then reassemble the console. The keyboard jack can be located almost anywhere you want on the surface of the console. You cut a hole in the console and secure the jack through the hole. Most users will probably prefer the left side of the console near the joystick port. I saw a public demonstration of this supposedly technoklutz friendly installation procedure at the 1994 Chicago faire, and it didn't work! Several sources have since told me that the "press on" technique is not stable, and this has been my own experience. W.H.T. now recommends soldering all the prongs of the interface to the corresponding pins of the 9900 chip on the console motherboard. Unless you are good with a soldering iron this can be tricky. W.H.T. offers dealer installation of their product for an additional $30. I recommend this option. Send W.H.T. a console you can afford to be without for awhile (Don O'Neil of W.H.T. tells me "3 weeks worst case") along with a check for $95 ($65 + the $30 installation fee) and they will return your console with the AT interface installed and guaranteed for 1 year. You provide your own locally purchased AT keyboard. The W.H.T. AT keyboard interface is intended for standard 99/4A consoles without most other modifications. It is definately NOT compatible with "32K in the console". W.H.T. tried and failed to install the interface in a console of mine with an internal speech synthesizer board. There wasn't enough room for both the AT interface board and the speech synthesizer board. The AT interface WILL work with consoles modified for 80 column use with the AVPC, TIM, or Mechatronics 80 column devices. I have my interface installed on a console modified for AVPC use. If you have TIM, please note that the SOB product often sold along with TIM is not compatible with the AT keyboard interface. The obvious reason for the interface is to let you use an AT 101 key keyboard on your 99/4A system. There is such a variety of these keyboards on the market that I am sure you can find one that exactly suits your personal needs. Variations available at my local stores include click or non click keys, mushy or hard or everything in between keypress force, strange shaped "ergonomic" designs that help keep your hands from getting tired, and either a trackball or dedicated arrow keys to move the cursor. The 99/4A keyboard is ok, but if you have the room on your computer table an AT keyboard is much better. Any AT keyboard takes up less table space and is no wider than a 99/4A console plus firehose connector. My new AT keyboard is a real pleasure to use! I particularly like the big and keys and the dedicated cursor arrow keys. When you turn on your modified console the AT interface adds about 1 second to powerup time. This means that you really do have to turn on the console after turning on the PE box, just like TI's directions tell you. You can use the console's keyboard whether or not you have an AT keyboard attached. If you do have an AT keyboard it comes up with caps lock and num lock on. This is a very logical arrangement. With num lock on you get immediate access to keyboard's numeric keypad with its own key. This makes entering numerical data very convenient. Except for word processing I usually have my alpha lock down, so having the AT keyboard start up with caps lock on seems very natural to me. Caps lock on or off does not affect joystick performance. You don't have to turn caps lock off to use joysticks. Many of the 101 keys do things with a single keypress that require multiple keypresses on a regular 99/4A keyboard. The F1 through F10 keys act a FCTN/1 through FCTN/0 in Basic and in TI Writer. Separate arrow keys move the cursor in 4 directions. The ALT key is the same as the 99/4a's FCTN key and can be used instead of or in addition to the F1-F10 keys. A lot of the 101 keys do nice useful things in TI Writer. Keys labeled Tab, Insert, PgUp, PgDn, Delete, End, and Home do what they say in TI Writer. There are other single keypresses that kill-to-lineend, oops, and window right in TI Writer. When logged onto a BBS you can press Pause to stop and start text scrolling. The Esc key returns the escape character (ascii 27), useful in controlling your printer. There is a destructive backspace (something not found on the 99/4A keyboard) usable in both Basic and TI Writer. Many of you know that other PCs have type ahead keyboard buffers allowing you to type faster than the software can accept your input. What you may not know is that the keyboard buffer is built into the keyboard, not the PC's CPU. With the W.H.T. AT interface we 99/4A users can now take advantage of any AT keyboard's keyboard buffer. The main benefit of such a buffer is in word processing. No end of line missing characters with TI Writer or the Funnelweb editor. The keyboard buffer can give you some strange effects with some software. If you hold a key down too long some software will register multiple keypresses of that key, even if the click keyboard only clicks once for the key. I notice this with REDISKIT, which requires three upper case C presses to begin to copy each disk. If at the beginning of a copy operation you just repeatedly tap the C key without counting, or hold it down too long, REDISKIT will format a copy disk, copy a master disk onto the copy disk and then imediately start reformatting the same copy disk again without pausing after the first copy is made. When using REDISKIT I have to remember to press C only 3 times and not keep my finger on the C key too long. There are a few problems using some software with the AT keyboard. However all such problems can be solved by switching to the 99/4A's keyboard when a problem is encountered. For example, the Clear key (Fctn-4) doesn't work in basic to break a running program or in Funnelweb's Disk Review to abort a disk management operation. Another example; software that has its own keyscan may not respond at all to the AT keyboard. Such software will, however, work just fine with the console's keyboard. This software includes Atarisoft games, Telco, Fast Term, Mass Transfer, and the Horizon Ramdisk Config program. As of this writing (late December 1995) the AT interface does not like the console's automatic screen saver. I am told that a replacement EPROM fix for this is in the works, but I don't yet have this new eprom. If you purchase the AT interface, ask W.H.T. if the screen saver problem has been fixed. If you already own an AT interface, ask about obtaining a replacement eprom. Otherwise, you will have to put up with the behavior described in the next two paragraphs, which can be annoying. With the screen saver bug, in either Basic if you don't type anything in command mode for about 10 minutes the cursor stops flashing and the screen does not go blank. Usually you can recover by just typing something on the AT keyboard, but not always. Sometimes you have to type a key on the 99/4A keyboard to recover. Some software, such as Funnelweb's central menus and disk review do not allow the console's screen saver to activate. If you are running screen saver sensitive software that uses 40 or 80 columns, when the screen saver activates then your screen may pop into 32 column mode and not clear. What you see is strange looking 32 column text and strange colors. The software is still there and functioning. Only the screen display is messed up. To recover all you need to do is press a 99/4A (not an AT keyboard) key. I notice the screen saver problem sometimes when copying disks using DSKU, DM1000, and the AMS copier. If you have large capacity disks there may be some time between keypresses while the copy process continues. After a few minutes, even while disk copying is in progress, the screen pops into 32 column mode with strange colors. Most annoying to me is the way the screen saver bug affects the Funnelweb editor. Even when actively using using the Funnelweb editor, after about 10 minutes the screen goes fireworks as the console's screen saver kicks in. To recover you have to press a console keyboard key, and this usually slightly disrupts your word processing document. Funnelweb, but not necessarily other forms of TI Writer, is coded in such a way that AT keyboard keypresses are not detected by the timer that activates the screen saver. This is very annoying, but not fatal. There is a possibility that special software will be written just for the AT keyboard interface. The interface has the sockets for 64K of 0 wait state 16 bit ram in the system rom area. Right now there is no software to use this feature but I am told that David Nieters, author of the keyboard interface software, has been working on a terminal emulator that works out of that space and gives high speed support. There are no promises that this will become a reality. ------ ACCESS: Western Horizon Technologies, 3297 Woody Lane, San Jose CA 95132. Voice phone 408-934=0352 (ask for Don O'Neil). Fax 408-934-9682. Internet email doneil@hooked.net Charles Good, P.O. Box 647, Venedocia Ohio 45894. Phone 419-667-3131. Internet email cgood@osulima1.lima.ohio-state.edu or good.6@osu.edu