Testing a Vortex PC66 Keyboard on an IBM PCjr 

*"What about those passive PS/2 to USB adapters?"* Nope, those don't work! The keyword there is _"passive."_ Those old adapters only work if the _keyboard itself_ supports PS/2 compatibility already, and an increasing number of modern USB keyboards dropped PS/2 protocol support long ago. A passive adapter has no idea what to do with the USB signals on its own, and that’s what the USB4VC is for: it _actively_ converts the protocol to PS/2. And of course, as a nice bonus the USB4VC also allows for connecting wireless input devices, and those old passive adapters certainly don't allow for Bluetooth :)

I wrote the code for the PS/2 to PCjr keyboard converter. Cool to finally see it in use on one of your channels. :)

I just love the irony of having an adaptor containing enough power to emulate the system itself probably ten times over, just to get a vintage system running :)

Never change the blerbs' format. Experiencing your real discovery with you, and not feigned reactions during a voiceover after the fact, really communicates the magic of it all with us. Good stuff.

When your keyboard adaptor is about 1000 times faster than pc you are using

Clint's enthusiasm for project ideas nobody else would come up with never ceases to put a smile on my face.

That has to be the most ridiculous way to connect a modern USB keyboard to a PCJr. And I love it!!!!!

Always nice to see these old IBMs getting some love.

Man, Round 42 brings back ALL sorts of memories from back in the day! That was always one of my absolute favorites

40 years now, damn! But what a great, great computer, even if it was flawed. And that badge, ooooh.

as an electronics engineer it tweaks my brain that one would have to wait for a 1ghz or more full computer to boot just to act as a keyboard translator

The amount of joy you got from being able to type downstairs was fantastic.

I used the USB4VC this weekend to get some Descent 1 going with a PS4 Bluetooth gamepad. All the mappings! I showed it on 'DOS Fever Dreams' if you're curious about my mapping. IMO these games are so well suited for this.

As much as I love the main channel videos, there's just something special about the vibes over here on LGR Blerbs :)

Clint I was so excited to see you post another pcjr video. I’ve been playing with mine that I got last year quite a bit. I got all the texelec upgrades except is still need to pick up the soundcard. I finally picked up a gotek that can emulate 360k disks so that’s been fun to play all the old booter games that hadn’t been converted to be installed to a hard disk. This old system has so much life left and I’m glad people that love it have unlocked the potential it should have had back in the day.

I always love adapter shenanigans! Great Blurb!!

The Raspberry Pi has been so great for getting modern solutions for old hardware, whether it is something like this or the PiStorm for the Amiga or Pi1541 for the 8 bit Commodore line

This is the perfect amount of effort for a blerb. Love it.

That Key Punch disk brings me back to the old LGR days.

right there at the end I could imagine "Near and Far" by Grover on Sesame Street. That was hilarious!

I Like that keyboard sound. It's like a lighter yet still solid clicky sound. Mix with solid click with a lighter click LoLz. Nice 📹 video thx for sharing!

Wow, the Master Blaster disk. I played the hell out of that as a kid on my Tandy 1000. Was bad at all of them. Not my earliest gaming memory (had an Atari after all), but certainly very early. Almost want to set the Tandy up and play it for a while.

I got the PC68 in black (with Gateron Yellows Pro) after watching your first video, and I just love it!

This is stupid... in such a freaking awesome way! I love it. I love all these retro adapters that get modern peripherals working with old tech.

I'm not interested in IBM PCjrs or Vortext PC66 keyboards (whatever those are), and yet I know I'm going to enjoy this video.

Ah, love the PCjr! It is my spirit PC: small, insignificant and a failure :P

SO many good videos lately. This was neat.

Always thumbs up for a PCjr video. Many thanks!

I miss the sounds of a 5.25 floppy drive!

Pretty funny that a raspberry pi which is literally 65000 times faster than the PC jr is only used to convert a keyboard to the pc jr lol.

Always nice to see my first home computer in action after all of these years...great memories!

2:25: It looks like the TexElec PCjr Joystick & Keyboard Breakout Board does what it says on the tin and ONLY what it says on the tin. In other words, it obscures/blocks the light pen port (LP) and the odd spare port (L). I realise light pens were rare and the "L" spare port was even more mysterious (like, what does the L even stand for?), but I think those should have been passed through or left unobstructed, because you never know. PS: Same for the external RF modulator port (T, for television), which is also blocked.

That looks like a cozy sweater

aw man was hoping to see the joysticks work. still pretty cool it all worked... lol the irony of using a much more powerful computer as the solution.

Clicks on this Keyboard is so satisfying 😊

I had a near heart attack at the 5.25”s hitting the desk without a sleeve 😂

I love having the USB4VC, what a great product to have around for old systems.

Ahh my beloved IBM PCJr!

Seeing that Master Blaster floppy takes me back to those early videos you did just going through those on a 5150.

It’s funny how similar that sounds to my Vortex Race 3 keyboard. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s basically the same construction under the skin.

Thanks for the blerb Clint. You need to do a "so you found a computer at a thrift store" tutorial about what to do first when you bring equipment home. There's obviously lots of quirks and niche items, but when you get a pc from a random store, what is your process?

It's funny that the converter board runs probably literally a million times more instructions per second than the PC Jr 🤣

Thank you for awesome content ❤!

Totally bonkers - totally loving it 😊

Love it when a plan comes together.. :)

At least that’s cute, but a delightful keyboard for PCjr.

Love myself a weirdly wonderful blerb. Happy new year good Sir. May 2023 be filled with lots of those shenanigans =)

This is why I love raspberry pies, they're so versatile! And delicious too.

Very cool! I'd love to see some Commodore Amiga content, especially the Amiga 2000 since it had the IBM bridge board capability.....please please please I remember using one at Columbia College in Chicago around 1988 that had an at the time super high end paintbox in it please do it or I'd settle for some Amiga Video Toaster content

You did sound thrilled to do this video lol maybe it was just me.

LGR, we need a montage video of you plugging in various connections and cables, sometimes in slow motion, with appropriate exciting music playing. Perhaps with a few shots of you concentrating and sweating mixed in. Like a classic Rocky training montage scene.

you go as nuts over old computers as I do over new ones

"This is an old computer indeed." *DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LITTLE THAT NARROWS IT DOWN, CLINT?*

Compatible peripherals with settings on flash memory instead of relying on system dependent software need to be more of a thing.

The wireless keyboard test had "Ernie from Sesame Street" energy all over it 😆

That PC jr. sounds like a pipe organ hitting the same note the whole time. Soothing.

Dang, I just realized that your PCjr has 62940 bytes of free RAM and that's soooo close to being nice

Junior blerbs

Syntax error

i love the pc jr's big chunky-ass font. i'd say "i wish it got more support" but the tandy 1000s were pretty much just that but better.

I'm lagit tempted to buy one for my retro gaming space

Emulation is fine but having the soft disk in hands and hearing the IBM traditional noise is priceless.

When "Conversion Technology" involves a whole computer...

Something about the concept of using an entire Raspberry Pi as a lowly (but intelligent) keyboard adapter for a far weaker computer bothers me, but it really shouldn't. This is the way of things... and the results are cool.

This keyboard reminds me of Amiga A600. I would love to have one.

The Pi probably has more grunt than the PC jr - so a nuts setup

Nice, it never hurts to just try things out .. and film it for the rest of us :)

If I could have LGR in my life every day (2 in a row now) I would be so happy

Going through all this to use a keyboard 😂 I would expect nothing less from an LGR video.

Clearly the biggest thing missing is a little stick-on round glass lens to go on the back of the Vortex keyboard to simulate the IR transmitter.

Have you ever done anything on Sidewinder Force Feedback joysticks? I would love some tips!!!

So how much more powerful is that Pi board compared with the PC JNR? xD

I created a USB keyboard to AT/XT adapter using a Raspberry Pi Pico (ps2pico) which boots instantly and gets its power from the host PC. But I don't know if it works on a PCjr.

Wow oh wow. I just had a 14-minute ad at the start of the video. I could skip it but, a 14-minute commercial.

Tradition is preserved xd Typing "farts" to test KB 😂

All the modern small mechanical keyboards are perfect for use with vintage computers, apart from the one teensy weensy detail; USB. Cos I'd love to use one with my ongoing Commodore 64-DTV projects (a "Desk/Set-top" one built inside an ex-Freeview digital TV receiver, and a sort-of SX-64 built into a portable 6" TV), but the whole converting USB to PS/2 adds additional complications, which I'm too lazy to muck about with, cos laziness is a lazy-inducer... :P

Damn, I miss my PCjr.

I'd be interested in seeing what kind of latency it adds. I know the USB to PS/2 adapters I have used in the past introduced an unacceptable amount of delay.

Oh how I miss all the old computer sounds. The beeps and boops and seek noises. mmm....

Today I finally realized why the pc jr failed.

Rube Goldberg would be proud ;-)

That is awesome this worked right way.

Clint, you taking steps further back until you went downstairs was reminiscent of a Looney Toons cartoon.

I need to explore more M$DOS games. I didn't think much of them back in the day as I was an Amiga faithful lol

as need as it is to get stuff to work with stuff it's not meant to work with, a keyboard without a delete key is obscene. Always hated the lack of that one essential key when i had to work on the old PowerMacs - since I write a lot, there are just some keys that needs to be on the keyboard

Its insane to me, just finished linuses vid about an $80000 AI computer than watching this! Tech is crazy!!

To me, the Vortex PC66 screams "one person's preference" much more than it says "generally usable product". I bet what happened was, a single prosperous user contacted the company and got them to make this keyboard exactly tailored to their wishes and preferences, but Vortex retained the right to sell it to others too (thus lowering the price of the custom keyboard). Hence the notable omissions of Insert and Delete keys, very much unlike the PCjr keyboard layout. To make the PC66 more generally usable, I would turn their PgUp into Ins, PgDn into Del, and make Home, PgUp, PgDn & End accessible via Fn+arrow keys (like on the PCjr), but I would change things so that unlike on the PCjr, Fn+up/down arrows would be PgUp/Dn and Fn+left/right arrows would be Home/End. That the PCjr did it the other way around was very illogical. I would then turn the PC66's newly-vacated Home and End keys into NumLk and a Win\Menu key, where Fn+Win=Menu. NumLk wasn't on the PCjr, but could work like it does on laptop keyboards, perhaps with extra lettering on UIOJKLM, etc. Win\Menu might cause problems where those two or other Fn+keys need to be combined. Perhaps configuring Fn+Win as sticky might help. That said, this wasn't on the PCjr either, and the key would simply be left dead when used with an actual PCjr. What was on the PCjr however is a bunch of Fn key combinations: Pause, ScrLk, Echo, Break & PrtSc are labelled on the QSEBP keys, respectively. I don't know what the Echo key is; perhaps that was intended for @ECHO OFF/ON, but I don't think this outlasted the PCjr. For general usability, Echo could be replaced by SysRq, or perhaps SysRq could be added as another Fn label on R. Alternatively, if a new variant of the PC66 were to be sold with an adapter box specifically for the PCjr, NumLk, Win\Menu and SysRq could be left off and Home and End could just stay where they are, with only PgUp/Dn accessible via Fn+up/down arrows. Just bringing back Ins/Del and the Fn+QSEBP keys might be enough to approach 100% PCjr compatibility.

all that i have ever needed in my life was... BLERRRRRRRRBS!

This is one of the Blerbs of all time for sure! ~Farts

I set my USB4VC up recently. Neat device, but it didn't like working correctly with my KVMs. Seems like the implementation needs some tweaks, I wanted it to be a frontend for 6 different PCs (DOS, Win98, WinXP, several macs), run keyboard/mouse + gamepad. It's doing good for gameport on one of those PCs for now.

I can't say I have seen a PS/2 cable before! I have only seen it coming out of keyboards and mice

funny, the keyboard converter piece has about 1000 or 100,000 times the raw cpu power of the PCjr...

They should really sell some keycap replacements for custom set ups

I'm over here hearing "PS2" and trying not to think of the Sony Console lol

the raspberry pi is so much more powerful than the pcjr and all its doing is converting the keyboard input. its like using a ferrari to charge the battery for your kia rio.

Does that USB for VC work with XT machines?

Drink when he types FARTS

Sweet!

Cool, now do full LSL2 playthrough, lots of typing involved

I think that is such a fantastic combination. It WOULD be nice, however, if that could all run off of a much less expensive PLC like an ESP32 or similar based system. I'm sure it could be done. 🤔