Noticed this, this morning:
Looks like a very nice little board - either stand alone, or designed or fit inside an existing (presumably dead!) PET…
They don’t say anything about the firmware though.
-Gordon
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Excellent! That’ll use the standard ROM I would expect. The same outfit (Dave Curran, Tynemouth Software) has made a range of ZX81 workalikes, and he’s got a particularly nice way of doing the keyboard in that case, putting a second PCB over the tactile switches:
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Great (while small)! And for the case have a look at the “PET de lux” by Love Hultén:
(I guess, some wood working skills may be required.)
However, I’m a bit wary about the keyboard, which may be even worse than the original chiclet keyboard. Given that the PET 2001N had an actual (full travel) keyboard, this may be a bit on the ironic side. It may be interesting to upgrade this with more serious switches and clear ortho key caps with a provision for paper inlays, in case you would want to use this for actual programming.
Is it not in ROM? It appears they are selling that, too:
https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/petromram.html
While looking at that, I found they also have an SD card solution for the PET!
https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/sd2pet-future.html
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I found this on the website:
28K ROM, selectable BASIC 1/2/4 with support for normal or business** keyboard.
This is actually 6 ROMs in one, the original ROM (BASIC 1), the standard one with disk functionality and the monitor (BASIC 2) and the later version with advanced commands for disks, etc (BASIC 4, as seen on the PET 2001N and later PETs), each with two versions of the keyboard decoding, once for the usual graphical keyboard and once the for the business keyboard. There are three dip switches to be seen on the board for selecting the various options.
It seems, there is no special firmware for interoperability, just the original ROMs, but there’s SD2PET as an option.
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