Re: Faking a Sun keyboard

> Is there a way to fake the existence of a keyboard when booting up?

Yes, of course.

> I don't want to leave a keyboard plugged into a mostly headless unit
> but I also want to be able to use serial port A for other services.

> On a PC it's usually enough to draw current from the port to convince
> the machine there's a keyboard present.  I wondered if there was
> anything similar for the Sun keyboard port.

Not that simple.  Sun keyboards - at least before they went PS/2 and
USB and suchlike - are just 1200 baud serial devices, except they use
TTL voltage levels instead of RS232 voltage levels.  I don't know
exactly what the CPU expects out of the keyboard, but it would be
pretty easy to write software to pretend to be a Sun keyboard on an
ordinary serial port (presumably connected to a Sun keyboard port via
level shifter electronics), especially if you don't care about actually
producing keystrokes.

You might try snooping the data lines between the machine and a resl
Sun keyboard to see what the protocol the ROM code cares about looks
like, though I suspect just answering a reset command suitably would
probably be good enough.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		[email protected]
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B