Sun Type 6 Keyboard in Windows

December 13, 2009 9:35 PM

I came into possession of a Sun type 6 keyboard and want to see how much use I can get out of it in Windows.

Having dedicated cut,copy,paste keys is just awesome. After exhaustive googling, i've seen others asking about drivers come up empty. There was a half english half japanese website that I found that tried but only got about halfway.

Is there any software that I can use to see what keys windows is even seeing as a first step to using them in macros or such?

posted by gzimmer to computers & internet (8 answers total)

I've used a Type 6 on a Mac, and found that I could remap those fancy keys with a shareware thing called ControllerMate.

I bet any of the Windows drivers for joysticks would work, the ones where you assign a raw signal to some keyboard key, so that pressing Up on the analog equals numpad-8 or whatnot.
posted by rokusan at 9:41 PM on December 13, 2009

A quick google turned up this AutoHotkey, I don't run windows but I am sure you could give it a quick try and record macros by pressing the custom keys and assign actions.
posted by moochoo at 1:09 AM on December 14, 2009

I've used AutoHotKey before, but I'm not sure if there's anything that would allow me to simply press a button and see if the computer recognizes it. I know that there when writing a script I could use short hand for specific keys, but that would be a key that would be standard on a keyboard.
posted by gzimmer at 3:32 AM on December 14, 2009

Here is a generic one. No idea if it's any good, but I still think that game-controller mapping is your best bet.
posted by rokusan at 4:51 AM on December 14, 2009

I think this might be what you need in regards to autohotkey.
posted by o0dano0o at 7:54 AM on December 14, 2009

I just tried both AHK's built in keyboard hook and the linked DLLCall's detection and got nothing from the additional keys. I may just be out of luck...
posted by gzimmer at 1:11 PM on December 16, 2009

I've seen a few pages where people get the keyboards to work in Unix OSes.
http://ileriseviye.org/blog/?p=1070
http://pirx.candyland.cx/~adi/type6/
The best thing I found involved making a converter for the older serial cable keyboards to USB
http://kentie.net/article/sunkbd/
But I don't think any of the work would apply to the USB version...
posted by gzimmer at 3:00 PM on December 16, 2009

This is the site I mention previously, again, this is a hardware solution for the serial type keyboards, but I'm not sure if any of the work would apply to the USB version.
posted by gzimmer at 3:04 PM on December 16, 2009