Hello,

I have an old Toshiba HX-10AA machine that is unfortunately very dead. As it's beyond reviving, I'd like to use it to rehouse a PC motherboard into it so that it still serves a purpose (ie - a retro fit-out).

Is there any way to plug in the MSX's keyboard into a PC (USB/PS/2, whatever...)? I've had a look through these forums and have scoured Google, but to no avail so far - I've found the opposite (plugging a PC keyboard into an MSX), but not the other way.

I'm after either a pre-built solution or a bit of DIY (as long as it doesn't go too much beyond soldering and a parts list). Seeing that the MSX keyboard seems to be fairly basic, would it be possible to simply hack it to the kayboard circuitry in a standard PC keyboard?

I should be possible, but it probably wouldn't be very easy. The PC keyboard is significantly different from the MSX keyboard system, so you'd prolly need to do *a lot* of soldering, unless you can find some way to fix this with some programmable logic. Anyhoo, prolly not worth the hassle.

A nice idea, to be honest I doubt it would just be a simple case of a rewire. Padial, a Spanish MSX hobbist, does a device to connect a PC keyboard to MSX, I think to do that he uses a microcontroller. Can anyone advise?

In this case I think you can do a rewire, but it's still not very practical. If I remember correctly the Toshiba's have actual micro-switches soldered to a motherboard, so you could -in theory- cut all the lines on the board, and then solder wires to each of the switches. You could then connect the wires according to the PC's matrix, connecting them to the print-board of a normal PC keyboard. Seeing how there are quite a few keys though, and even more wires, it's just not really worth the hassle. Then of course there's also the problem that PC keyboards have more keys than MSX keyboards. I dunno, but it's just not really practical...

Thanks Sonic and djh for your advice. I'm not too fussed about the time involved (after all, it's for an interesting case mod, as opposed to wanting it to be an efficient use of time ). The microswitch approach sounds a good way to go (if it does have that inside - I haven't opened it for some time). I guess my main issue will be ensuring that I have adequate space inside the case to allow for the additional keyboard circuitry to be there as well, whilst ensuring that the two boards can be manoevred easily enough (as I suspect the PC components will need a bit of fiddling to get it all to work).

I think, that you can use a programmable keyboard encoder to avoid rewireing the keyboard. See here:
http://arcadecontrols.com/arcade_input.shtml#KeyboardEncoders

you stil need to do some tricks
it looks easyer than it is i think

What if you just connect it to the PC as it is, and just see what keycodes come out of each key and then bind them to a function.
At least some Linux programs can do this, like zsh's zkbd.