liamur
Active member
When I got my Mac Plus, it came with an ADB mouse and keyboard. Obviously those are useless with the computer, so I gave them back and pursued other options in the interest of cost (it's about $150 for a used and compatible keyboard and mouse). I found a cheap PS/2 mouse to Atari ST converter on eBay, made an adapter for the Mac, and bought a $2 PS/2 mouse from a thrift store. Done and dusted, and it works great.
The keyboard was a bigger issue. I found Tomek Rękawek's blog post about his Mac Plus, and I liked his PS/2 keyboard to Mac converter. However, I really didn't want to have to buy and store another PS/2 peripheral, especially a keyboard, because of the size. I saw mac-plus-ps2 and said, "I can do that without the PS/2 keyboard."
So I did. My project is mac-plus-serkey, an Arduino-based keyboard interface that receives keystrokes from a host computer and sends them to the Mac. Naturally it is slightly more cumbersome than a dedicated protocol converter, but it is sufficient and perfectly effective for simple use. It emulates most of a Mac Plus keyboard, excluding the keypad but including the arrow keys.
Most information is on the GitHub page, but you need an Arduino (I used an Adafruit Metro Mini I had lying around), a telephone handset cable, and a USB cable to connect to the computer. The cable has to be soldered onto some Arduino pins. On the computer, you need Python 3 and the Pygame and pyserial modules and must run the Pygame host from the command line. Then, what you type in the Pygame window (with the charming picture of the Mac Plus keyboard) is sent to the Mac.
It is definitely not perfect---it can't handle especially fast typing and it seems to get laggier the longer the Arduino is plugged in, but it works for basic use. I have used it quite a bit, and managed to do some effective THINK C coding with it.
The keyboard was a bigger issue. I found Tomek Rękawek's blog post about his Mac Plus, and I liked his PS/2 keyboard to Mac converter. However, I really didn't want to have to buy and store another PS/2 peripheral, especially a keyboard, because of the size. I saw mac-plus-ps2 and said, "I can do that without the PS/2 keyboard."
So I did. My project is mac-plus-serkey, an Arduino-based keyboard interface that receives keystrokes from a host computer and sends them to the Mac. Naturally it is slightly more cumbersome than a dedicated protocol converter, but it is sufficient and perfectly effective for simple use. It emulates most of a Mac Plus keyboard, excluding the keypad but including the arrow keys.
Most information is on the GitHub page, but you need an Arduino (I used an Adafruit Metro Mini I had lying around), a telephone handset cable, and a USB cable to connect to the computer. The cable has to be soldered onto some Arduino pins. On the computer, you need Python 3 and the Pygame and pyserial modules and must run the Pygame host from the command line. Then, what you type in the Pygame window (with the charming picture of the Mac Plus keyboard) is sent to the Mac.
It is definitely not perfect---it can't handle especially fast typing and it seems to get laggier the longer the Arduino is plugged in, but it works for basic use. I have used it quite a bit, and managed to do some effective THINK C coding with it.
but good work.
