Yes, native support is the idea. After looking at how the AZERTY driver works, it would be possible to remove the azerty option rom after the driver is installed. the driver is a LOMEM driver. But, it does steal the timer interrupt to do so. I think that is the main issue. Anything that uses the timer interrupt would break,.
So, I think the AZERTY variant is compatible with option roms in general, with that caveat. And every cold restart needs to have the AZERTY driver reinstalled (option rom swaps!). Steve On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 8:53 AM Brian White <[email protected]> wrote: > Nice. > > So the point would be to make the main rom natively azerty to match the > hardware, free up the option rom slot for normal use, without otherwise > changing the main rom so that it becomes incompatible with application > software? I guess you might even be able to make a dvorak version and move > the keycaps around? > > I'm just trying to imagine the sales pitch for that azerty 200 that needs > the option rom, thus preventing the use of any other option rom (or at > least making it pretty inconvenient by having to swap them on every reset I > guess?) > > "Here's your new model 200. It's only half as useful as others with no > modem and no option rom but you can still pay full price please." > > -- > bkw > > On Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 8:28 AM Stephen Adolph <[email protected]> wrote: > >> hi folks, >> >> Thought I would share this work. It is a spreadsheet for computing the >> keyboard table in the T200 so you can make native custom keyboards for T200. >> >> Why? >> The AZERTY keyboard in Europe was accommodated using an option ROM that >> kinda hacked the keyboard. Keystrokes get intercepted and corrected to be >> AZERTY even though the main ROM is set up for QWERTY. >> >> An alternative is to have the main rom directly support AZERTY. >> To do this, there are 6 keyboard mapping tables that start at 9763h. >> Each table are 44 bytes long. >> >> This spreadsheet lets you assign the ascii codes for each of the 44 >> affected keys, for all 6 tables. (unshifted, shifted, GRAPH, shift GRAPH, >> CODE, Shift CODE). >> >> It is an excel spreadsheet that included the analysis add it so that >> certain needed functions are present. >> >> Once you make the correct keyboard mapping, the spreadsheet provides the >> 6x44 bytes in assembly compatible form, so you can compile and patch the >> tables with a hex editor. >> >> This approach could be used for other machines also. >> Note - the AZERTY keyboard did NOT modify the actual character set, so >> that is out of scope. Of course it is possible to patch the main ROM to >> change the bitmaps as well. Not handled by this spreadsheet. >> >> Comments welcome. >> Steve >> >>
