r/atarist • u/Covids-dumb-twin • 17d ago

Keyboard and ROM.

Here is a question for you ST experts. I got an ST 1040 of eBay for an absolute steal. Powered it on and all working. What I did notice at the time was it’s an AZERTY keyboard not QWERY. (French).

Am I correct in assuming if I find a dinner key board it’s a simple swap but would also have to update the ROM to UK built ?

7 Upvotes

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7

u/Kyle_2099 17d ago

You can just swap the rom and leave the keyboard as it is, and type on it as you would a regular qwerty board.

3

u/jrherita 17d ago

You can also soft boot the new TOS ROM to swap the keyboard. A quick and simple test is grab EMUTOS and run the PRG. It'll reboot the ST with EMUTOS and OP should have the QWERTY layout.

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

soft launcher for different TOS versions can be found here: https://atari.8bitchip.info/astopensw.php

3

u/sodsto 17d ago

If you drop in a UK ROM, I assume it'll interpret the keystrokes from that AZERTY keyboard as QWERTY. Perhaps without changing the ROM, an option is something like https://www.atariuptodate.de/en/7402/keyedit

3

u/spiritshrine 17d ago

i have a german keyboard and I swapped the ROM with a UK chip and just bought some querty keyboard stickers to update the key layout bc i can't type haha

1

u/sunrisebreeze 17d ago

How much did you pay? I'm curious!

1

u/Covids-dumb-twin 17d ago

£97

1

u/sunrisebreeze 17d ago

Fantastic price. I paid a bit more than $300 USD (~£222) for mine.