pocketnerdio / keyscan

A tool to show you the ROW and COL of keys on a Psion SIBO/EPOC16 machine.

KeyScan

A tool to show you the ROW and COL of keys on a Psion SIBO/EPOC16 machine.

It is based around the p_getscancodes() function in PLIB, which calls the HwGetScanCodes system call.

It was designed to work out the keyboard wiring for the Siena, but could be used on any SIBO machine running EPOC16 3.18 or later (i.e. the Series 3a onwards, plus HCs that have been updated). It can't be used on earlier machines because HwGetScanCodes wasn't implemented.

How KeyScan works

Every 0.5 seconds, KeyScan will call p_getscancodes(). The output of that is put into an array of 10 words, which represent the physical columns (COLs) of the keyboard. Each bit in a word represents the physical ROWs. KeyScan iterates through each COL and, if any key is pressed (i.e. if scan[i] isn't 0), it works out which ROW has been activated.

KeyScan handles multiple keys pressed on the same COL, and multiple ROWs.

Each line starts with COLc:ROWr (0xrr), which are the COL and ROW in decimal, followed in parentheses by the ROW mask in hex.

At the end of each line, in square brackets, KeyScan prints the COL number and its value in binary, regardless of how many keys have been pressed.

You can exit KeyScan by pressing Psion-Esc.

Compiling

You will need:

• A copy of DOS (physical machine, in a VM, or DosBox)
• The Psion SIBO C SDK
• JPI TopSpeed C 3.0 or later

There are instructions in the SIBO C SDK documentation on how to set up the SDK, including the correct location of files and setting up your PATH environment variable.

To compile, just run make at the command prompt.

C:\PROJECTS\KEYSCAN\>make

To remove the compiled files, run clean (the equivalent of make clean).

C:\PROJECTS\KEYSCAN\>clean

Installing

You will need to copy KEYSCAN.IMG to the IMG folder on the main drive of your SIBO device. If the folder doesn't exist, create it.

You might also need to install RunImg. You can do this on the System Screen by pressing Psion-J, selecting RunImg and pressing Enter.

You should see KEYSCAN below the RunImg icon.

TODO

• Capture application keys

Other Notes

I've included my c_cpp_properties.json file for Visual Studio Code, in case it's useful to anyone. You will need to change the path so that it points to your copy of SDK. I've set the C standard to C89 and the IntelliSense mode to windows-msvc-x86 - this seems to make IntelliSense complain the least.