If you’ve got an MX-style keyboard and want some retro charm, you might like a recent project from [Levente Szabadkai]. It’s a set of C64-style keycaps that you can print yourself at home!
The project started as an attempt to produce a set of C64 keycaps for an Ajazz 75% keyboard layout, but [Levente] kept pushing until it developed into a universal set. The keys have C64 legends, plain legends, or blank, and work for ANSI boards from 60% to full size. There are a few ways they can be printed. — you can do two-color printing with an FDM machine, or you can print the caps alone and fill the legends with paint, either in FDM or resin.
As a part of this work, [Levente] had to obviously create the glyphs to print upon all the keycaps. He thus decided to release that as the C64 keyboard font, in fact. It’s available in TTF and OTF formats, and you can preview the font in your browser, if so desired. It includes the function key labels, the 63 PETSCII graphic font legends, and various symbols, punctuation, and selected accented letters, too.
We’ve seen lots of vintage C64 parts recreated from scratch. It’s been at the point for a while where you can build a new machine with what’s available off the shelf. They said Amiga would never die, but it’s the earlier Commodore that really lives on today…
And if you’re more in the Atari camp, there’s this very similar project: https://github.com/bleroy/3d-junkyard/blob/main/DecenTKL/Media/DecenTKL.jpg
I like Amiga a lot but I don’t like the Amiga scene/market. There’s always a bunch of wars going on between different companies.
The C64 scene is way more relaxed in my opinion.
That’s becaus the Amiga was aiming for so much more.
The C64 was a relic by 1990, but the Amiga still had a potential future.
That’s why Amiga platform was ripped apart in first place.
By mid-90s the internet was young and fresh and still full of potential,
so its no wonder company tried to use intellectual properties/assets of the Amiga to its own advantage.
After all, the Amiga was one of the first multimedia PCs.
In a different reality, the Amiga and the cyber space might have survived.
the biggest problem i have with all the C-64 emulators is that there is no obvious way to type all those crazy characters. and it’s not just a cosmetic issue – you really need to know what the characters are to make sense of cursor-movement controls in old printouts, such as this listing of my ultra-dense VIC-20 character set editor dating from 1984:
https://github.com/judasgutenberg/vic20_character_editor/blob/master/chreditor_450.jpg
I bet these keycaps would be popular for a groupbuy.