The Sinclair QL Forum

The latest version of the Minerva support disk contains the following foreign keyboard drivers:

British (installed in Minerva by default, but good for reference)
Danish
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Italnum (not sure what the difference is here)
Spanish
Swedish
A special driver for the ABC Keyboard Interface

Don't forget that if you use SuperHERMES as an external keyboard interface, that has its own drivers (which support other languages too...)

We could do with developing one for other languages, say Greek to start (as someone has asked for this).

The important files on the support disk are (according to the manual) are:
<COUNTRY>_ASM Source for country's keyboard
<COUNTRY>_BIN RESPR code to redefine the keyboard
KBD_ROM_BAS Program to produce ROMabble code
AUTO/MAIN/SIN_INC Include files for _ASM
COBBLER_BAS Program to combine _BIN files
KBDTXT_BAS Display of screen layout

I think the best place to start might be the German or French keyboard ASM (which are attached) as a zip file (as the board will not allow me to upload the ASM file)

Rich,
those are not exactly drivers, but it's actually much simpler - Translation tables.

The problem would not really be creating the tables but rather gathering the requirements (I know, for example, what a german keyboard looks like - just like the one I have in front of me - but have never seen a greek one)

Regards,
Tobias

Yes, you are right - they are translation tables (although I am not sure what the numbers represent below the commented representation of the keyboard).

I've not seen a Greek QL either - although there was the Greek QL ROM, so presumably there were ones with a Greek keyboard layout!

Hi to all!
Below is a Greek QL keyboard layoyt! On the keys, the tiny little letters(it's hard to recognise them) below the greek characters, are the english characters.
I will give a try to make a greek translation table!

Sorry to dig this one up again after so many years, but I have a question related to the Minerva k/b layouts....

On the utilities disk (on Dilwyn's site) there are various _BIN files to take care of various language keyboards. I use the German one myself when I use my German QL with Minerva, and that's all fine.

There are also _ROM files for each country. I assume these are ROMable versions of the _BIN files. Does their small code need to sit at the expansion port ROM area, i.e. C000? What if you have TK2 starting at C000?

I just wondered if it's even possible (also with space being tight) to have Minerva, TK2 and the ROMable k/b code on a singe 27C512.

Chr$ wrote:Sorry to dig this one up again after so many years, but I have a question related to the Minerva k/b layouts....

On the utilities disk (on Dilwyn's site) there are various _BIN files to take care of various language keyboards. I use the German one myself when I use my German QL with Minerva, and that's all fine.

For German I maintain a German Minerva as you might now. I do so by removing the English portion and assemble it anew with German tables instead. I have to leave out the printer translation table in that case, it's such a tight fit.

There are also _ROM files for each country. I assume these are ROMable versions of the _BIN files. Does their small code need to sit at the expansion port ROM area, i.e. C000? What if you have TK2 starting at C000?

Then it doesn't work. You either have to use assembler to unify two competing ROM extensions or a tool like EPROM Manager or whatever it was called that does it for you. Besides the fact that even the latest TK2 versions that were not done by me don't fit into 16kb anymore. But you can have a full 64-kb EPROM with German Minerva and some form of TK2, be it a very old version or my newer ones with some optional part left out. It's more difficult for other languages that are not maintained by me because the extensions are >1KB and that is fucking huge when you're out of space anyway.

Marcel

Thanks Marcel, LRESPRing the bin files is the way to go then! Good to know.

mk79 wrote:... fucking huge ...

Ah, memories. I believe that is a technical term!

Cheers,
Norm.

Yes, it‘s defined as „space needed > space available“