I always wondered, what do the black and white square icons mean?
They're box drawing characters. The markings on the keyboard are what they looked like on screen.
ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
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Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#22I always wondered, what do the black and white square icons mean?
The ZX80 and ZX81, like a number of 80s personal computers featured a set of graphical characters in addition to standard alphanumeric and punctuation and provided a way to enter then directly from the keyboard. On the Sinclair machines you'd use SHIFT + GRAPH to enter "graphics mode."
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Commodor...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Atari-13...
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#23That is a sweet keyboard. It is rather better than my homemade one from 1982 https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1368566103933337603 My dad gave me a old keyboard from something and I traced the zx81 PCB to discover how it was wired, then rewired the new keyboard the same. I connected it by burning a hole in the case with my soldering iron to poke the wires through! It was a dream compared to the membrane keyboard.
Were you able to diagnose what's wrong with your ZX81? Usually it's a simple problem, it just takes a while to diagnose.
BTW, if you do want to get rid of it at some point, it would be nice if you could sell it on ebay or locally. The number of ZX81s left will just keep going down and they are quite decent for learning about electronics/digital systems.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#24a friend in high school replaced my b0rken membrane keyboard with pads from a standard issue touch-tone phone.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#25I know it feels a bit reductionist, but what % keyboard would you call this? Feels like its somewhere 40% to 45%.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#26I always wondered, what do the black and white square icons mean?
As others have said, they're character graphics. Much used in ZX81 games because the ZX81 didn't have direct support for full resolution (256 x 192) bit mapping.
There were a couple of hi-res hacks - pseudo (partial_ hi-res, which was a hack of the character system, and full bit-mapped hi-res which only worked with internal RAM or special modified external RAM.
Both were a bit of a project (for the time.) Some games used them.
My fav ZX81 program was the 1K chess. Very basic character graphics, but it somehow managed to fit a minimal but workable chess engine into 1K of Z80 machine code.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#27I know it feels a bit reductionist, but what % keyboard would you call this? Feels like its somewhere 40% to 45%.
I think this is smaller than 40%. A classic 40% Planck is 4x12 keys
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#28That is a sweet keyboard. It is rather better than my homemade one from 1982 https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1368566103933337603 My dad gave me a old keyboard from something and I traced the zx81 PCB to discover how it was wired, then rewired the new keyboard the same. I connected it by burning a hole in the case with my soldering iron to poke the wires through! It was a dream compared to the membrane keyboard.
Why didn't you chop the excess from the sides of your mechanical marvel especially considering you had removed all the key caps?
It's super cool. I did a lot of zx81 hacking back when I was very young too.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#29TIL just how reasonably (relatively speaking) priced it is to get completely custom keycaps.
Re: ZX81 Mechanical Keyboard
#30It's hard for me to capture the level of nostalgia I have for those 4px graphical elements that you could use for graphics. They allowed you to control graphics with the conditional logic of Basic. I had so much fun making animations with different scenes.