Re: New national C128 versions found

From: Geoff Oltmans (oltmansg_at_email.uah.edu)
Date: 1999-06-02 15:54:08

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Nicolas Welte wrote:

> Nicolas Welte wrote:
> > I'm still unsure about the identity of these keyboards and I'll try to
> > make some scans/fotos of them, but everybody is invited to help me with
> > suggestions right now.
> 
> I didn't get much help yet, but maybe this will get better with this new
> page:
> 
> http://www.chemie.uni-konstanz.de/~welte/cbm/keyboards.html
> 
> Please visit this address, have a look at the pictures and tell me if
> you can identify one of the keyboards.

Well, the one you say is an italian keyboard I think is a french keyboard.
I'm comparing the key layouts to those found in the A500 owners manual. 

On the French keyboar (and I'm saying this from the US standpoint), the A
is where the Q should be, The Z is where the W should be, and ',/?' is
where the 'M' should be, and M is just to the right of 'L'. With the
exception of the A/Q situation on your keyboard the rest is the same as a
French keyboard, whereas the italian layout has the M, Z, and W and their
regular positions. In addition, the key to the right of the M on the home
row also matches the Amiga French layout. There are two accented 'e's on
the number row, which also matches the french amiga layout....these are on
one key on the italian keyboard.

So, my thought is that perhaps somebody decided that the keyboard needed a
good cleaning, and popped off a couple of keycaps and mixed them up,
namely the A and Q. Seems a likely candidate since the 128 keyboard isn't
contoured and therefore all the keycaps are the same height.

Did you get these keyboards complete with the computers? One thought you
might check on is if the GRAPHICS characters on the front of the keycaps
are where they should be...maybe they are is the same position no matter
what keyboard you're using.

You could say that this isn't an accurate comparison since the Amiga and
Commodore keyboard layouts are significantly different between the US
versions of both machines, but there is more of a correlation between the
French map than the italian one at least.

Later,

*Geoff!*


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