> On Sep 13, 2016, at 09:16, Al Kossow <[email protected]> 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. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <[email protected]> http://www.nf6x.net/
