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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to type on a keyboard from the Soviet era? Imagine a device so robust that it was deployed in the hallowed halls of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Today, we dive into the history and functionality of the Console 2624, a hall effect keyboard from 1989, and ask the question: can it hold up to modern gaming standards?
The Console 2624, built using components from Tesla in the Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic, doesn't glow under the lights. But can you game on it? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. It's one of the best keyboards we've ever tested. But wait, there's more—it's also one of the worst. Let's unpack that.
What does it feel like to type on this ancient marvel? "Wumpy," they say. Listen for yourself and hear the segue to our sponsor, the Hello Cam Pro, offering a 1080p resolution, 60 FPS frame rate, and Windows Hello facial recognition.
The Console 2624 was crafted by ZUCO Bruno, a company that has built everything from rifles to cars. But today, we focus on getting it working. The first hurdle? The mysterious connector. It's a game port, but not quite. It's the same da15 connector used for simple asynchronous serial communications.
Using pointers from a helpful post on the Deskthority Keyboard Forum, we hook up six pins and provide a square wave at 16 times the frequency. We use a Raspberry Pi Pico to send the clock signal and read the serial data. But something's off. Different keys produce the same output. We need to see the individual bits to understand what's happening.
Enter the Rhoden Schwarz oscilloscope with an ASCII mode, showing us the raw output and the corresponding ASCII character. We change the mode and see the data in binary, revealing that the first half of our data varies with different keys, but the second half does not. Why?
Tracing back, we find that the UART chip receives a 9-bit parallel signal from the keyboard controller, which gets translated into two halves of a single byte by the ROM chips. One of these ROM chips is broken, causing the issue.
But why nine bits? Seven bits give us 128 values, enough for a basic ASCII table, and two bits for modifiers, giving us four values: no modifier, control, shift, and repeat. Unlike modern keyboards, this one doesn't register multiple key presses when you hold down a key unless you also hold the repeat key.
This has interesting implications for gaming. If only we could get it working, we could intercept the signals by wiring in our microcontroller before the broken ROM chips. We program the microcontroller with our own lookup tables based on the documentation we found, turning it into a USB HID device.
Using the keyboard for gaming is a challenge. The arrow keys are for movement, not W, A, S, D. The keys are slow and slightly unresponsive. But with adjustments, it becomes usable. The polling rate determines how long the computer thinks the key is held down, affecting gaming performance.
Despite its quirks, the Console 2624 is one of the most consistent keyboards we've ever tested on our robot. The actuation force and travel distance are nearly identical from key to key, thanks to its 80-style solid steel backplane. However, key stabilization has come a long way in the last 35 years.
In conclusion, the Console 2624 is a fascinating piece of technology. It's a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of Soviet engineering. While it may not be the best choice for modern gaming, it's a reminder of how far we've come in keyboard technology.
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