Sergey Kiselev MSX OMEGA computer and... a keyboard for it.

 Sergey Kiselev developed some time ago an MSX2 compatible computer :

This is one of the boards that I buid. Building this kind of retro-computer costs a certain price, in particular because of the connectors which are also of the MSX type and are not very affordable today.

In fact, I hesitated to build the keyboard that Sergey developed for this OMEGA, thinking of using a standard and cheaper keyboard either PS / 2 or USB.

Obviously, the most common models today are of the USB type. So I developed a small USB interface on one side and parallel on the other to interface with the keyboard bus of the OMEGA board :

This interface uses a specific processor which manages the USB protocol to which I have added an STM32G0 type processor for the decoding of the USB frames intended for the OMEGA board.

The documentation of the USB management circuit being very ... light, I had some difficulties in retrieving the key code from the USB keyboard.

But here I am:

The right part of the ST IDE displays, among other things, the value of the Key variable, corresponding to the value 0x14. I actually hit the 'A' key on the keyboard, which matches well the 'Q' code on the standard keyboard. And yes, I use a French keyboard ;-)

The code is not very well written yet. All I have to do now is manage the sending protocol to the OMEGA board and I will finally be able to interact with this computer. So far I've only managed to get the init screen, which isn't bad :-)