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Re: Keyboard layout/character set question

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On Friday, January 20, 2023 at 3:03:05 AM UTC-5, Colin Leroy-Mira wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I have a french Apple 2c, with a french keyboard and a toggle button 
> that allows to switch the keyboard layout from french to US. The button 
> has two effects. It switches characters codes for standard ASCII 
> characters (ie, 'a' becomes 'q' and vice-versa), but for "extended" 
> characters, the code is not changed, only the display is. 
> For example, if I hit 'é' while in french mode, it's going to display as 
> 'é'. If I toggle the keyboard to US when an 'é' is displayed on-screen, 
> the display of this character changes and becomes an '{'. (this is 
> quite funny, but a bit impractical). 
> 
> I'd like to programmaticaly know which mode the keyboard is in, but I 
> can't find anything related in PEEKs and POKEs or anything. Does anyone 
> know if this is possible ? 
> 
> Thanks! 
> -- 
> Colin 
> https://www.colino.net/

I don't know for sure, this is probably more a hardware question than a software question, but I'd guess it's not possible.
I did a lot of playing around with the keyboard (I had a U.S. apple //e) and the only available information was the key pressed, read from $C000 and the high bit of the $C010 soft switch was the any-key-down flag.

So if you're going to probe around, I'd look at the bits in $C010 and probably the other bytes from $C001 to $C010 and see if they show any change when the switch is flipped.

My guess is that this is done in hardware and never makes it to the software side of the machine.

I only remember this so well, because I played around a lot with the keyboard trying to make the $C010 any-key-down flag line up with the byte read from $C000 to tell me what key was down. But the important bit there is that the auto-repeat feature of the keyboard is in hardware and not adjustable or even detectable in software, which is why I'm going to guess that your switch isn't either.

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Keyboard layout/character set question Colin Leroy-Mira <colin@colino.net> - 2023-01-20 09:03 +0100
  Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Stu M <nixomose@gmail.com> - 2023-01-20 20:24 -0800
    Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Colin Leroy-Mira <colin@colino.net> - 2023-01-24 11:36 +0100
      Re: Keyboard layout/character set question fadden <fadden@fadden.com> - 2023-01-24 07:40 -0800
        Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Antoine Vignau <ntn.vignau@gmail.com> - 2023-01-24 12:27 -0800
    Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> - 2023-01-24 22:50 +0000
      Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Stu M <nixomose@gmail.com> - 2023-01-25 04:28 -0800
        Re: Keyboard layout/character set question qkumba <peter.ferrie@gmail.com> - 2023-01-25 10:59 -0800
          Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Stu M <nixomose@gmail.com> - 2023-01-25 12:26 -0800
          Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Andrew Roughan <no_email@invalid.invalid> - 2023-01-30 11:29 +0000
            Re: Keyboard layout/character set question Stu M <nixomose@gmail.com> - 2023-01-30 13:15 -0800

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