Gaming on the Keyboard from Chornobyl

this is the console 2624 a hall effect keyboard that was made all the way back in 1989 in the cssr the czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic using components from Tesla and it was deployed in places like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this thing doesn't glow does it not if we keep the lights on that's reassuring I've already got a lot of questions but the lab made that old Soviet Mouse work so so I'm guessing the answer to can I game on it is yes yeah you can and it's one of the best keyboards we've ever tested but also one of the worst we'll unpack that in a bit first I need a word for what this thing feels like wumpy here listen for yourself and listen to the segue to our sponsor next too say bonjour to the hello cam Pro and give your setup an upgrade with its 1080p res resolution 60 FPS frame rate and windows hello facial recognition you can learn more at the link in the video description our specimen here is a product of zuco Bruno or Bruno Armory first founded in 1918 they made everything from rifles to cars to farming equipment and they have a soccer team named after them now anyway none of that matters for the moment what matters is getting it working and I suspect our first problem is going to be this connector they used a game Port well sort of it's the same da15 connector but in this case it's used for simple asynchronous serial Communications simple-ish this helpful post on deskthority keyboard Forum gave us some good pointers and as it turns out we only need to hook up six of the pins ground serial input and output both 5 and negative2 volt power and finally a clock pulse does asynchronous cial normally need a clock pulse no ah so there's your ish a little more on that later for now according to Forum post we need to provide a square wave at 16 times the frequency or B rate okay oh but there's a recommended value wow I can't believe how easy this is turning out to be we just wire our connector up to a microcontroller like we did last time in this case a Raspberry Pi Pico that we've programmed to send the clock signal using timer upts and then read the serial data and spit it out over USB okay not super familiar with their alphabet but hey I know Numbers One MH two o x uh okay V uh it's pretty clear something's wrong because if this is how it worked I'm surprised Chernobyl lasted as long as it did time to do some digging we can see that different Keys produce the same output but to really understand what's at play here we're going to need to see the individual bits and hence you weren't kidding this is awesome Rhoden Schwarz has an asky mode that means that not only can we see the raw output but it actually shows us up at the top exactly which asy character it's supposed to correspond to of course as cool as this is that doesn't really fix anything so in order to do that we had to change the mode what are we looking at now so once we showed it all in binary we could very easily and Visually see that the first half of our data was varying as he presses different keys but the second half was not varying at all we had to figure out why this was happening interesting so that's how we compress two different keys and get exactly the same or a similar enough output that we get the same value that my friends is why electronics need to come with schematics it's like a breath of fresh air you guys if this keyboard was a tightly integrated modern device we'd pretty much be throwing it in the garbage but thanks to our comrades at Zaba Bruno we've got this a complete guide to the inner workings of our keyboard so all we need to do is work our way back from the connector to see what's going wrong this right here is our data output line and it comes from this green thing right here that is a uart chip which is short for universal asynchronous receiver transmitter in a nutshell it serializes incoming parallel data and then outputs it at a given frequency fun fact by the way there was a parallel version of this keyboard the 2423 that didn't have the uart at all and um would have saved us a lot of investigative work because we would have immediately noticed the problem when we read the raw data that half of every bite was locked to one but why well the input to the uart comes from these two Orange ic's right here these are rom chips that hold lookup tables if we Trace back one more step we get to the keyboard controller which takes its input from a pretty typical keyboard Matrix now we're all the way back let's go forward that Matrix gets translated by the keyboard controller into a 9bit parallel signal and a strobe signal that indicates a key has been pressed the nine bits go to our ROMs here and get translated into two halves of a single bite which the uart receives and then converts to serial once it sees the strobe signal it then sends that to the output or at least that's how it's supposed to happen as it turns out one of our ROM chips is just broken also wait a second nine bits ah I'm glad you asked see seven bits would give us 128 values which is enough for a basic asking table or or whatever kind of asy table we're dealing with here then there's two bits for the modifiers which means four values and that turns out to be no modifier control shift and repeat wait repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat yes repeat okay guys that's enough sorry sorry see on most modern keyboards repeating is builtin so when you hold down a key it registers multiple key presses but on this one it's press once fire once no matter how long you hold it unless you also hold the repeat key the repeat key the repeat key we can actually see this in action if I just hold down the key takes a second to spool up but kind of has some interesting implications for gaming doesn't it if only we could get it working we can we just need to ignore the parts that don't work we just need to intercept these signals by wiring in our microcontroller before these broken ROM chips so they can't mess anything up we programmed the microcontroller with our own lookup tables based on the documentation we found and then the microcontroller just acts like a usb hid device are we ready now of course we just need the uh magnetic Cable Management Arch from LTT store.com heck yeah it helps if you actually put it on the cable I did the one that we need this one's useless fair enough oh why do I have to use the Soviet Mouse too no I want a real Mouse maybe later but right now we need to try it with this oh it's so bad though the arrow keys are your movement not WD well where's anything got to look around there's the arrow keys up there they're line they work slowly what it works ever so slightly no that's not Zed or X that's Q well where are Zed and X you got to look around Zed God X nice oh oh no oh no come on a little bit too much so um because the keyboard only detects uh the pressing down the amount of time that the computer reads that you press the key uh is set by us so currently it's not really reading it very well okay well why did you do that I thought it' be funny come on okay can we change it higher yes we can change it thank you okay new attempt here we go this going to be way better right yep I changed the delay to 50 seconds instead of one 50 Mills okay shoot that was just user okay this is really unergonomic still but um this is this is totally usable so this is just essentially the the the polling rate that it's set to uh it's like how long uh the computer thinks the key is like held down and then let go so the signals are only sent when you like press a key not when you let go like a modern keyboard right so it's how long I tell the computer I'm pressing it you're pressing a key I am I don't think this is professional Tetris not very good at Tetris so that's good I thought I was doing bad okay look I am old oh you can't like press multiple things at once though it's very aren't you excited to play an FPS God no it changing the thing every time I rotate is driving me absolutely crazy okay what what is oh God this mouse I was like well I'm done with this game alt F there is no alt well there's no F keys there few how does this keyboard work f space is f pay respect to this keyboard why is it not going up you could just use the like arrow keys I'm going to have to play an FPS game Ariel going to try totally playable see you just got to press it a lot like oh and then it holds it down um wasn't doing this before uh uh uh C where's c c out of fuel um double okay can I have a real Mouse yeah this one right here all Oh Glory kill e yes yes yes yes yes okay still alive I'm not close enough come on E yes yes yes still alive oh no wait what can we do with teamwork okay so I'm going to hold the repeat key oh what is going oh right okay so I can't hold the repeat key when you space otherwise you're going to continuously jump oh we got to like let go at the right time yeah okay okay okay there we go get get over there get over come on come on go brother go now you have got to be asking yourself how could we say at the beginning of this video that this is the best of anything as it turns out it is one of the most consistent keyboards that we have ever tested on our robot that is to say that the actuation force and the travel distance is nearly identical from Key Tokey thanks in no small part to its 80 style solid steel back plane you got to love it of course if you're not pushing the key straight down right in the center you're going to have a pretty bad time uh let's just put it this way key stabilization has come a long way in the last uh 35 years years you know what else has come a long way my Segways to our sponsor manscaped Step Into Summer with confidence thanks to manscaped and their performance package 5.0 Ultra it includes the lawn mower 5.0 Ultra groin and body hair trimmer turn that overgrown Forest into a Serene Garden just don't expect any flowers to start growing there if they do please seek help also included is the weed whacker 2.0 electric 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 868,942

Keywords: keyboard, soviet, C.S.S.R., Czech, slovak, old keyboard, old technology, chernobyl, peripherals, old hardware, soviet tech, vintage tech, pc gaming

Id: g1meziEMdsk

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2024