[georgedb]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

You... lucky.... ~@~!!

This word starts with a "B", right ;-) Yes, I was, and am still, very happy with it... I know technically the keyboard works fine, but it is a lot of work to fix it. I got new membrane domes (different from the ones Martin is using), I got the original cover (the sheet with the captions) and front plate (black metal) and all transparent plastic parts. And I got new material to surround the domes that needs to be glued on the PCB (not glue, self adhesive foil).

I don't know if it is something unique, but I had never seen a picture of it before: I got a MK14 power supply (see picture).

Do you realise how much original MK14s can go for nowadays? Even two years ago it was not unusual for examples which were physically poor / not even working to go for upwards of £400-£500. Better examples with a working, original keypad, a nice manual and one or two of the optional boards were sometimes fetching about £900 or more.

Insane, but true indeed.

I think the emergence of all these replicas recently will actually devalue the original machines somewhat because before, people had no choice, if they wanted one they had to buy one of the original machines which tended to come up relatively infrequently. Now, they can have the experience of owning a machine in pristine new-build condition for less money, if they don't have their heart set on owning an original machine.

Not sure about this, but we will see. Luckily I didn't pay a fortune...

As regards the keypad, I would have thought that just buying one of Martin's keypad overlays and some suitable calculator-type switch domes would get you quite close to one of the original versions of the MK14 keypad which went through several incarnations, but be careful what you wish for: I don't think any of the several keypad designs which SOC went through were considered satisfactory by their owners. The early 'Rubber Mat' version fitted to my issue II was especially dreadful.

I think Martin needed to adapt something to get it working and I'm trying to keep things as original as possible. More original than what I'm planning to do is, as far as I can see, impossible....

Later issues of the MK14 (including issue V of course) provide for an alternative, the fitting of actual switches of a similar type to the one used for the reset switch or anything else which would fit in the holes.

From a functional perspective, that is actually the only solution that gives the user a keyboard that you can work with. Those buttons can still be bought in many places (but without any caption). I'm actually not sure if SoC ever sort of provided a set of keys with captions that you could buy?

Anyone know how to get a Czech on-screen keyboard on their Windows computer?

There seems to be a lot of info through Google. didn't take the time to check the details, but it might be that you need to add a keyboard layout through your language settings first and I guess that once you activated a keyboard, you can't separate between the on-screen keyboard and the normal keyboard. Not sure, you would need to check.

I guess the background of your question is that you want to try to Google Translate the datasheet? I online OCR-ed the datasheet to Word (then you still got the layout) and started translating sentences, that you can now easily select. But, as it is Word, things started moving on the page and it all became crap. It took me a lot of time only to find out that my whole page was based on font size 4! When I tried to change it to a normal font size, Word distorted the whole page, I suffered from severe Technology Related Anger and threw it away, thinking to set it up from scratch, with a layout as close as needed to the original datasheet. That's were I still am ;-)