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Geoffg

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Joined: 06/06/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 3333

Posted: 11:49pm 14 Jan 2026

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Many years ago Dr Kilian Singer from the University of Kassel developed a method of generating colour on the original Maximite which led to the Colour Maximite. Since then (amongst many other things) he has ported GNU Typist to MMBasic on the PicoMite HDMI/VGA and I thought that the folks here would be interested in reading his description of it:

Quote Now for the kids at school I ported gtypist a gnu type trainer with a lots of training material to mmbasic.

The keyboard handling in the firmware is not doing proper dead keys as expected with german keyboard but due to the flexibility of mmbasic I could implement it. The training material needs to be converted to codepage858 which to my optinion is a good compromise between western characters and screen drawing symbols. Other keyboard settings for french, belgium and spanish are harder to implement as the firmware is missing some keys.

The kids love it and are training with it.
Tested with picomitehdmivga.

here is the github link: https://github.com/kiliansinger/gtypist_mmb

Prof. Dr. Kilian Singer
Experimentalphysik I
Universität Kassel

Geoff

Geoff Graham - http://geoffg.net

IanT

Senior Member

Joined: 29/11/2016
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 122

Posted: 09:29am 15 Jan 2026

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Well I've downloaded it and it will find itself on my Grandkids (Picomite HDMI) SD cards when I next go down to see them (part of the software support service I now seem to be providing)

Thank you Geoff & Dr Kilian

IanT

matherp
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Joined: 11/12/2012
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 10861

Posted: 09:53am 15 Jan 2026

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Geoff
I included some new functionality in MMBasic for German where keyboard characters that don't have an ascii representation give high value codes 200 upwards. I would be happy to do this for any other supported languages if someone can tell me what keys are missing. If you are in contact with Dr Singer then you could let him know. The change is just to add values into the USB keyboard mapping tables. For German:

201, 63, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_MINUS_AND_UNDERSCORE = 0x2D, DE: ß=225
202, 96, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_EQUAL_AND_PLUS = 0x2E, DE: ´=239
203, 204, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_OPEN_BRACKET_AND_OPEN_CURLY_BRACE = 0x2F, DE: ü=129,Ü=154
43, 42, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_CLOSE_BRACKET_AND_CLOSE_CURLY_BRACE = 0x30,
35, 39, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_BACK_SLASH_AND_PIPE = 0x31,
35, 39, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_NON_US_HASH_AND_TILDE = 0x32,
205, 206, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_SEMICOLON_AND_COLON = 0x33, DE: ö=228,Ö=229
207, 208, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_APOSTROPHE_AND_QUOTE = 0x34, DE: ä=132,Ä=142
94, 209, // USB_HID_KEYBOARD_KEYPAD_KEYBOARD_GRAVE_ACCENT_AND_TILDE = 0x35, DE: °=167

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