Q68 Serial devices

The Thor, Aurora, Q40, Q60 & Q68 etc. are discussed here.
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bwinkel67
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bwinkel67 »

Derek,

I offered $6 per unit for two and the shipping went from $10.10 to $10.72 so they will give discount if you buy more...in case you choose to stock up and maybe give an option for the Q68 for those that want to use USB. I will post here how well it works once I received them.


bixio60
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bixio60 »

I wrote him to check if eventually he can deliver to France a couple of unit.
Let's see.

Keep you posted

Fabrizio

bwinkel67 wrote:BTW, for $18 currently on eBay they are selling USB to PS/2 converters. These things usually run closer to $100:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/BLACK-BOX-MODE ... 2400356399

I'm assuming as long as the PS/2 end acts like PS/2 the Q68 cares little about there being a USB keyboard and/or mouse on the other end (as long as no drivers are involved).

Anyone have any luck with these before I invest in one.


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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bixio60 »

I am waiting 2 devices, he accepted to ship to France, soon an update hoping it will work :)
Fabrizio
Peter wrote:
bwinkel67 wrote:BTW, for $18 currently on eBay they are selling USB to PS/2 converters. These things usually run closer to $100
Thanks for spotting this :!:
Indeed it looks like an active converter, which is needed if someone wants to use USB-only devices with the Q68! (Some wired keyboards/mice are actually USB+PS/2 combo and work with just passive converters.)
It won't ship to Germany, so I hope someone in the US will test it.

Looks like good a solution, if someone wants wireless or is afraid of PS/2 obsolecence.


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bwinkel67
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bwinkel67 »

bixio60 wrote:I am waiting 2 devices, he accepted to ship to France, soon an update hoping it will work :)
Fabrizio
I got mine yesterday but unfortunately shipped to school and I wasn't on campus. I will pick them up early next week and then try them. I'll post an update as soon as possible. Excited to try my favorite USB devices on it.


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Peter
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by Peter »

Thanks for the update, that will be interesting, especially when it comes to the mouse interface. If it works okay, could you please create a new topic with suitable headline, so people actually notice there is such a converter? Maybe even under "Hardware", as it is not really Q68 specific and could be used with SuperHermes QLs, Q40 and Q60 as well.


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bwinkel67
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bwinkel67 »

Peter wrote:Thanks for the update, that will be interesting, especially when it comes to the mouse interface. If it works okay, could you please create a new topic with suitable headline, so people actually notice there is such a converter? Maybe even under "Hardware", as it is not really Q68 specific and could be used with SuperHermes QLs, Q40 and Q60 as well.
Finally came in:
IMG_0695.JPG
So it works and it doesn't work, that's why I'm still posting here. Plugged it into the Q68 using my splitter cable (which works for my PS/2 mouse and keyboard) making sure mouse goes to mouse and keyboard to keyboard. I tried 3 different USB keyboard (Two Dell's and an HP), none of which have built-in PS-2 circuitry (tried a green little pass-through first), and they all had similar behavior. It works initially, sometimes losing keys if you type too fast, though quite normal at the beginning, and then starts acting up. It repeats keys without typing, the return key occasionally quits working (but the number return key still works), it doesn't recognize ctrl-space for breaking, it goes into uppercase mode without explicitly doing so -- these are the ones I observed. So there is some incompatibility. I tried a modern HP USB mouse and that worked fine, seemed a bit fast (I was using the Black Phoenix GUI for testing), and the left and right button worked (don't recall trying the wheel).

I bought two of them, one for school and one for home and again, only brought one home figuring it would work (d'oh). So I have to wait until later to grab the other one and see how it works. Additionally, of all the old computers I have sitting around my home (two old desktops and a handful of laptops from the mid 2000's) none have a PS/2 port. Frustrating because I specifically have an Inspiron 8600 running Windows 7 exactly for situations like that since it has a DB-9 RS232 serial port, a DB-25 parallel port, s-video, all built into the motherboard...yet no PS/2 (I think I also had an Inspiron 8300, which were a bit uglier, that did have all that and PS/2 and I got rid of it).

At school I do have several Dell desktops and one old (40MB RAM running Windows 98) Thinkpad that I do know have built-in PS/2. So I need to test this device on those to see if the device itself is at fault (so either the one I brought home is bad or the design overall is bad) or if the Q68 is having some sort of communication and or timing issue.

I assume you would have an idea of what sort of timing issue this could be. Here are the specs if that is helpful (only speaks to what is supports not an in-depth document):
KVUSBNF.pdf
(250.55 KiB) Downloaded 110 times
Wish I was one of the lucky few to have a Spectrum Next as it too has PS/2. That way I could see how it handles it.


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bwinkel67
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bwinkel67 »

BTW, could it be that support for only USB 1.0 and 1.1 could mess things up with devices that are built for USB 2.0 and 3.0? Are keyboards and mice built in the last few years somehow requiring some mechanism of USB that 1.0/1.1 doesn't support. Keyboards shouldn't need speed since we are speaking touch-typist speed. I can try and find older USB keyboards to see if that makes a difference.


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Peter
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by Peter »

My suspicion would be that the converter might have no buffer.

At the moment, the Q68 fetches keycodes with a rate of up to 50 per second. The Q68 hardware the tells the keyboard not to send more, until a recent keycode was processed. In that case, the internal buffer of the keyboard holds the code until it is allowed to send again.

It would be interesting to test the converter with a Q40 or Q60, because they have a dedicated keyboard interrupt, allowing for more than 50 keycodes per second. If it works there, we'd know what the cause is.


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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bixio60 »

Q60: I will do as soon as it will arrive....it is taking age, update later.

Fabrizio
Peter wrote:My suspicion would be that the converter might have no buffer.

At the moment, the Q68 fetches keycodes with a rate of up to 50 per second. The Q68 hardware the tells the keyboard not to send more, until a recent keycode was processed. In that case, the internal buffer of the keyboard holds the code until it is allowed to send again.

It would be interesting to test the converter with a Q40 or Q60, because they have a dedicated keyboard interrupt, allowing for more than 50 keycodes per second. If it works there, we'd know what the cause is.


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bwinkel67
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Re: Q68 Serial devices

Post by bwinkel67 »

Thanks for the insight Peter. I will test this on my late 1990's IBM Thinkpad which is the slowest and oldest of the bunch to see how it handles it just as a baseline. And again, I will test the other one on the Q68. All next week. Also, I am in touch with BlackBox tech support and forwarded them a question regarding buffering. They did respond to me initially which I was surprised since the product is 15 years old.

BTW, I'm guessing this would be a communication issue then where the PS/2 port on the Q68 is attempting to set up this handshake for buffering with the converter and somehow it is failing...i.e. I'm not typing fast enough to overload the Q68 at 50 characters per second as I'm typing probably more around 10 characters per second.


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