This all starts with someone counting one too many beans 30+ years ago.
In media res — let’s get into it.
Observe (above) the layout of the Amiga 1200 keyboard that was sold in the United States. The keys highlighted in orange do not exist over here. Below is the US keyboard sold on the Amiga 500:
Ahh……much better. This is the layout that we old folks remember in the US. This is the US keyboard layout for the Amiga 500, which was the machine that made Amiga’s name for their brief moment in the sun, before being swept away in the consoidation of computing on Windows 95. There’s our BAE — the Big-Ass Enter. Sadly, these were the end days for our bae BAE……we’ll get to that.
Commodore, owners of the Amiga brand, were never a terribly well-run company. Loads of digital ink has been spilled covering that — I won’t rehash it here. Even in their heyday, Commodore was always under the gun to turn a profit despite the outstanding hit the C64 was, and the somewhat solid performer the Amiga line was. Often times, they made major decisions to cut costs even in the alleged good times. By the time the Amiga 1200 rolled around, the good times had already faded, and in a few short years, Windows 95 would mop the floor with everyone, with really Apple only hanging on by a thread after the bloodbath.
So when the Amiga 1200 was being planned, they standardized on one keyboard for all markets. Since you can have too many keys on a keyboard but never too few, plus the fact that Amiga was way more successful in Europe than in the States, this decision seemed clearheaded and sensible. It’s hard to argue otherwise. Even the Brits were kind of ok with it, despite also having two non-functional keys as well. I suppose they are much closer neighbors and going along to get along is a solid approach.
But it still irritates me to this day.
There are, of course, options: You can transplant a US-style keyboard from the Amiga 500. There’s a little bit of a technical difference between the two models, but bravery with a soldering iron is all you really need.
But that presupposes having an Amiga 500 that has so little utility to you that you would just remove it’s face to make the successor prettier. And the transplant in the other direction is trickier, for technical reasons which I will explain later. Maybe.
But now it’s 2026. Amiga never recovered from Commodore’s bankruptcy, but the scene lives on in full retro glory. The times are so good in Amiga-retroland that the enterprising faceless wizards of A1200.net have gone through the very, very serious trouble of tooling up replacement keycaps and very-similar-if-not identical switches to re-launch an Amiga 1200 keyboard. (Which also can go into Amiga 500’s with a little gizmo add-on.) Any basic research (and i specialize in ‘basic research’) into what it takes to re-launch a keycap set out of print for decades and switches that also haven’t been made in decades reveals that the molds and tooling needed to make these products aren’t cheap, and there is some rather large amount of a minimum order you have to make to get any manufacturing company to even take your call at all.
And it’s a testament to the strength of the Amiga retro market that A1200.net pulled it off. They put up some very large amount of money to get this done. In point of fact, the actual keyboard hasn’t quite shipped, although it is expected to soon. But the keycaps have — I’m looking at a set right now, while banging away at this keyboard on a Mac — like I’m gonna write this on an Amiga.
The funny thing about the keycaps is that they do have alternate spare keys, so if all you are doing is putting new caps on your Amiga 500 or 1200, you can lay them out the way the computer shipped. But the less funny thing about the underlying keyboard is that you cannot, in fact, order a BAE-US style keyboard. At all.
Which makes sense. A1200.net had to put up a lot of dough to get these things made, and i doubt they wanted to put up twice the dough to sell a keyboard that only one nation used consistently (the Brits got one layout or the other or both before the Amiga 1200 depending on the random currents in a cup of coffee as best as anyone can tell) and was, in the end, not a strong market for the Amiga to begin with.
But it still irritates me.
Ok, fine!
There are other options: Amigastore.eu sells a drop-in keyboard that uses current keycaps and switches. It’s laid out like this:
You’ll notice the bottom row is fundamentally altered. Modern spacebars are nowhere near as long as Amiga spacebars were, so to compensate, the designer of this keyboard (rastport.com), widened the spacebar’s neighbors and added an additional Ctrl key.
The important thing about making a drop-in replacement keyboard is that footprint has to be identical. Too wide it doesn’t fit; too narrow and it leaves ugly gaps. So Rastport and Amigastore made their choices to compensate. Not incidentally, they used off the shelf and standardized parts so now the whole world of mechanical keyboards is now open to the buyer of their product. I don’t know just how much the Euler diagram of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts and retro-computer enthusiasts overlaps, but it’s probably not zero.
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The point here is that there are options and enough of a market that at least two big vendors are trying to fill it. And that’s great news for the Amiganites. Contrast with other retro-computer communities and the picture isn’t quite as strong. When their keyboards die (and many of them were crappy keyboards to begin with) the only game in town is to dig up the corpse of another dead computer and steal its face for yourself. A grisly bit of business, even in metaphor.
But I’m still stuck on those damn non-functional keys.
(A note: I can’t use the term “dead keys” — dead keys are a thing in other keyboard languages. A dead key allows you to add some sort of mark to the next letter you type. If you need an ‘a’ with an accent for example, you can hit the accent dead key, then the ‘a’, and you get an ‘à’. At least that’s how I understand it. English has scarce use for the adornement of letters and does not have any dead keys. But you can alt and alt-shift your way to a suprising number of characters, but that is a story for another day.)
Ok, fine!
Some number of homebrew keyboard enthusiasts have made replacement keyboards well before Rastport/Amigastore using modern mechanical keyboard parts, and of course Amigastore itself is a pretty big player in the Amiga vendor scene. The process is validated by the big boys (relatively speaking) and multiple implementations exist done by basement dwellers like myself. I’ll just get one of theirs……
Well, balls. They’re all the European ISO layout, too.
Ok, fine!
I’ll make my own! I will solve the problem no one else has wanted to solve since some product manager at Commodore Amiga decided to simplify product development. Let me go online and buy my own keycaps……
I just need to find a vendor who stocks BAE Enter keys……
Well, ok, they exist, but they’re usually part of a specifically designed set so I’d have to have the other labels that aren’t Amiga labels — like Help, or the big ‘A’ keys……
And look at all of those slightly wider f-keys the Amiga has……no one has that in their pre-made keycap set……
Huh.
Maybe there’s a reason for this gap after all. That BAE key was sort of part of the ANSI standard at one point, but it’s been deprecated long ago by the simple single-height return key.
An aside:
A word about standards. In this story there are two standards being used. ISO is the “International Standards Organization” and they have standards for EVERYTHING. Keyboards is one of the countless standards they have published. The ISO keyboard standard looks like this:
The other standard is the ANSI standard — I’ll let you guess what the ‘A’ stands for — that’s right; ANSI is the “American National Standards Institute” which sets standards in the US. Its not adversarial; ANSI is a member of ISO, but it seems on the matter of keyboard layout, they have decided to go their own way. Which makes sense; we dont need those two extra keys (next to the ‘Z’ aand next to ISO Enter). The ANSI standard looks like this:
You’ll notice that BAE isn’t here — it’s not clear to me if BAE was ever part of the standard, or if BAE was an old standard supplanted by a new standard.
Finally, you’ll notice there are way more keys on the actual standard keyboard than on the Amiga keyboards. I have been a little fast and loose with calling the Amiga keyboards either ANSI or BAE when in fact they are technically neither, or at least neither by modern standardization. And if I say the word ‘standard’ one more time, the word will shift to that weird place where words feel like they’ve lost their meaning.
Anyway, long aside……aside, I’m still going to remove those two damn keys if it kills me.
Stay tuned. In this series I’ll talk about why layout is only the first problem. I’ll talk about the other Amiga models (600, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, CDTV and CD32) and why I’m actually going to focus on a different project rather than the A1200 for now despite all this. I’ll survey other retro-computing communities and their keyboard issues. And I’ll talk about moving from “gathering the right parts” to “I’m gonna make the damn things myself because evertyhing is a frickin’ compromise when dealing with established vendors.”
