Mega65 Keyboard prototypes have been manufactured | Hacker News Reader

Mega65 Keyboard prototypes have been manufactured

c65gs.blogspot.com

90 pointserickhill26 comments

A fake floppy drive. That's sort of like cars with an "air scoop" on the hood that goes nowhere...heh

And I have the feeling it'd have been extremely unpopular at the time - I'm sure I'd be hitting it all the time.

The official project page states that it will house an actual floppy drive, not a fake one. http://mega65.org/

They should consider a different place for the floppy drive or it would create serious ergonomic issues when operating the arrow keys. Moving it up so that it could interfere with less used keys (help, inst/del, restore) might be a solution. Or just copy the Amigas and point it sideways.

For better or worse, that wouldn't be faithful to the original C65. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/C6...

I understand the dream of having a retro thing. And I’m hoping the goal stays the way they like it.

The floppy drive irks me though. I’d still re-box that sucker or put sd card slots or USB inside it. Maybe if I can just get the motherboard and keyboard with the blinkenlights.

Having used a real C65 for a number of years, the floppy drive does not in fact get in the way of use of the cursor keys. Any, yes, we are putting real floppy drives in these.

MEGA65 is one of the coolest retro projects I know of right now, and it's really exciting to see this huge leap toward becoming reality (where "reality" means a chunk of hardware I can put my hands on...it's had seemingly functional source code for years).

Agreed, the Spectrum Next is another of those really cool projects and it’s even further ahead (entering mass production)

https://www.specnext.com

Obsessive about the spacebar size, but not about the keycap profile?

This looks a lot like the actual C65 keys. The cylindrical tops were all the rage in the late 80's.

So the keycaps are 3D printed too? Or are they something like dye-sublimated PBT? Are they intending to use "mechanical" (e.g. Cherry MX compatible) key switches, or something truly retro but unpleasant like foam-and-foil?

It appears to be a cherry MX keyboard, with dye sub keycaps.

They say the keycaps are from GMK who have cherry profile molds

I missed that. If this was a one-off GMK set, it was very expensive. They could run those keycaps alone as a group buy and do pretty well.

What about the rest of the mega65? I see that designs can be changed but is there a board to be had that works out of the box?

Love to see this. I have a mist fpga emu for the c64 St Amiga etc, but this looks pretty nice too!

Can you fix the kerning on the key fonts? The kerning and overall font choice is poor mainly because of the space constraint. Try Univers Next Condensed with 16 degree italics like the old Mac keyboard! If you want something normal then you can try Swiss721 or DIN in their condensed formats. Geometric sans (with Futura-like "O") such as the one chosen __does not__ work for keycaps.

Looks like the kerning is manually adjusted by someone who just wanted to cram the letters in the keycap space. For example, "CAPS LOCK" - P and S are merged whereas on the "TAB" key, T, A and B are nicely spaced.

This would drive me nuts and would never able to "unsee" the kerning issues.

The whole point is to faithfully reproduce the C65 prototype. They're extremely unlikely to change the font.

That said, the lines all look a bit thicker/darker than the original to me. That may be responsible for the kerning issue you see.

In the article they mention that "The discerning viewer might notice that the MEGA logo is bleeding together a bit in the little vertical gap. We will tweak this. Also, the printing on the fronts of the keys is currently black instead of grey, and there is a little over-bleed on the graphical symbols. We will also get this fixed."

I'm not sure whether this will completely resolve the issue, but it seems likely to at least help. [EDIT: Just noticed that it specifically says "on the graphical symbols" so I'm not sure they'll be adjusting the lettering]

Yes, the text on top will also benefit from correcting the over-bleed, that currently makes everything look a bit jammed together.

Why don’t these retro remake computers use actual 8 bit CPUs?

8bit CPUs are still available aren’t they?

I don’t get it. If it doesn’t have an 8bit cpu then how is it anything else but a modern machine?

I think it is - it's a 6502-ish CPU implemented, along with the rest of the logic, on an FPGA. It's just that it can run 40x faster than the actual CPUs.

Confirming the MEGA65's CPU is indeed 8-bit. We have gone to considerable effort to avoid having ANY non-8-bit CPU.

I still prefer inexpensive sponge based keyboards.

Everything else just hurts my wrists. Too much tactile feedback.

I recently built a keyboard with Gateron Clear switches (they have 35cn activation force) for someone who has problems with their wrists too. It made all the difference in her case. There are (AFAIK) a few manufacturers that offer full keyboards with those switches.

For me it's not the switches, but the keyboard height. I tried a low profile Kailh switch keyboard and it's much better. Still, I don't really find it any more fun than Apple Wired Keyboard or a similar low profile scissor switch.

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