Over time I have ended up with a couple of customisable Tipro MID keyboards without the custom lead to connect them to a PS2 port. These leads are no longer available for sale so I decided to figure out the pinouts. This is a quick summery of that work.
As the keyboards have a pass-though port for other PS2 devices and were unlikely to have a common ground and 5V line I could use a multimeter to check what was the “Gnd” and “Vcc” easily. This worked and I had those figured out after a few minutes.
Now I had the power sorted I just had the clock and the data pins to figure out. I realised that there were only 30 possible combinations and the keyboard were already programmed so would behave like, well, a keyboard when a button was pressed. Rather than mess bout I decided to just try all combinations and to wee what one worked. There was a remote change this could damage the hardware but that was very very unlikely and I had little to loose. As luck would have it it worked on the 3rd attempt.
So now we have the results. The layout is not dissimilar to that of a a PS2 connector albeit mirrored. Hopefully this will be of use to at least someone and save some hardware from the skip.
My next challenge is to reconfigure them. The configuration utilities (MIDWIN and MIDDOS) are still available from the Tipro drivers archive although it is recommended you use Windows 95, 98 or 2000. Wish me luck.
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