1. You can look at pictures of keyboards and compare them with what happens when you use SoftPC,

2. You can boot off the appropriate foreign system disk, and refer to the Mac Keycaps window as you work, or

3. You can buy the real Mac foreign keyboards and use them.

Not having the real foreign keyboards, we generally use a combination of 1 and 2, above. For testing we use an Extended II keyboard, as it has the maximum number of keys available on it. You do not need to test smaller keyboards as well, for reasons explained below. In PV there is a set of bootable Mac disks, one for each country. The keyboard layouts are in a black folder and the ones to use are the ADB EXTENDED ones for the appropriate country, at the back. Only when there is a problem, for example where a certain key mapping has been done to reflect the PC keyboard position, will you need to look at the PC keyboard layouts at the front of the folder. The one to look for is one of the Enhanced ones, for the appropriate country (******LEIGH...which one?*******)

When the Mac SoftPC code for foreign keyboard mappings is written, certain rules are followed which are set out below. Knowing these rules will help the tester or user to see whether they are getting the expected results.

Rule 1

Whenever an actual foreign Mac keyboard is used, any SoftPC keypress must match engraving on that keyboard, for both shifted and normal keys. Clearly then, the easiest way to test foreign keyboard-mapping would be to obtain and use the actual foreign keyboards. In the absence of these, however, the following rules are also applied.

Dead keys must be dead: e.g. a key which should produce, for example, an accent on the following character, should not produce anything until the following key is pressed.

3rd Shift (alt gr) keys will be treated as follows:

(a) they will be in the same place as a PC user would expect to find them UNLESS the same character is already represented elsewhere OR

(b) they may be where the alt key is, rather than the alt gr key, in other words where a Mac user would expect to find them.

"\" will vary in position but must be somewhere. [For amusement, you CAN get this character by typing "alt 9 2", or by copying one into the clipboard...]

1. Codepages

(i) Codepages are specified in autoexec.bat in the line keyb xx ,yyy, etc, where xx is the country code and yyy is the codepage number which is between commas.

(ii) International Codepage is 850, which allows characters such as Norwegian ø and Ø. (Codepage 850 does not work with CGA but there is a user-interface option which allows just the ø and Ø).

(iii) Standard US Codepage is 437, and has facilities for ¢ (cent) and ¥ (yen)

(iv) If no codepage is specified, 437 will be used.

(v) If the wrong Codepage is being used, certain characters will habitually go wrong, e.g. §, superscript-3 and n, and the international currency symbol which looks like a circle with four dots around it.

2. Extra hints, or When Is a Bug Not Really a Bug...

(i) If something strange happens with Dos keyboard.sys but does the same when you change to Insignia keyboard.sys, it is probably not a bug but a Codepage problem.

(ii) With extended keyboard II, System6, the right alt (alt gr) key does not work. This is Apple's bug and is fixed for System 7.

(iii) The smaller Mac keyboards are mapped to the Extended Keyboard II, and this mapping is covered by general keyboard tests