[stella] hooking up a keyboard to the VCS

[Glenn Saunders]

--- Adam Thornton <adam at fsf.net> wrote:
> I imagine
> that text *input*  
> will still be pretty painful though...

One of the key features of Chimera is support for
peripherals.  We needed a flash memory and serial
controller to meet the core requirements, but the ARM
does a lot more so we are trying to expose all this
stuff for developers.  Most of it really could have a
practical usage for the VCS.  With two serial ports,
for instance, you could potentially hook up two serial
trackballs and have true proportional trackball games
(without huge CPU drain) for the first time.  This
might also work for keyboards.  The Stowaway keyboard
for old Palm PDAs outputs standard RS232 serial ASCII
streams.  These can be had for $15 used.

http://tinyurl.com/qeexh

Then it's simply a matter of soldering the connections
between the palm dock connector and a male DB9. 
Chimera could do keycode to ascii translation or
optionally pass through the raw codes (so you can
detect things like shift and caps lock or key down key
up).

It might be a neat accessory to have.  If nothing
else, homebrews could optionally support it for
entering names for high scores.  It could also be
useful for RPGs, strategy games, or simulations with
more complicated controls.



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