In this post, I want to look at different ways of running an emulated Commodore 64 (or Commodore 128) and how they compare. The contenders are the THEC64 Mini, a half-size recreation of the C64 powered by an ARM CPU running an emulator, the full-size THEC64 that adds a working keyboard and the VICE emulator running on my MacBook Pro.
It's interesting to see how much has stayed the same over 40 years, and also how some keys have been moved around, as well as the differences between Apple's keyboards and the standard PC keyboard.
So I drew the layout of 18 keyboards to easily compare IBM, Apple, Digital, Sun, Amiga, Atari and third party keyboards over the years.
Read the article - posted 2020-12-17
I have a new mechanical keyboard on order, which lets you hot swap the keyboard switches. When you do that, it's a good idea to do a quick test to see if all the keys still work. There are many tools to do this, but I decided to make my own web-based one. I think it came out pretty nicely.
