X-Band Keyboard Support

[RobertDaleSmith]

I'm working on reverse engineering the SNES keyboard. I just finished up an arduino based controller adapter to convert the Xband keyboard into a standard USB HID keyboard. Now that I have a solid understanding of the snes keyboard protocol, I'm going to start work on an adapter to go the other direction and allow for any USB keyboard to be used on a SNES.

The Xband keyboard was donated to me for this effort but I don't have an actual Xband modem. So I am exploring options to test the actual keyboard and my simulated SNES keyboard adapter on real hardware. My initial idea was to create a standalone keyboard test rom but I'm not sure where to start with SNES game dev.

I found the source code from xband for reading the keyboard, so may not be too hard to implement with prior snes dev experience. Long term I would like to give everyone an affordable keyboard option for the revived xband community. But even more I want to create an example for future homebrew to use.

I was thinking maybe more fun to just shove it into SD2SNES firmware and add a cool text search feature as a starting point.

Example code:

https://git.agiri.ninja/natalie/xband-source
snes side code, catapult.tar.gz Catapult/Box-16bit-Feb96/Box/SNES/Hardware/SNESControls.c