Keyboard Pico: Kantan Waku Waku Keyboard

Keyboard Pico: Kantan Waku Waku Keyboard
Developer: Sega Publisher: Sega Platform: Sega Pico Released in JP: 1997 This game has debugging material.

An educational game for teaching the player how to type, using the Keyboard Pico.

Test Mode

A debug mode exists to read metadata and key presses from the keyboard.

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  After reading data and verifying the fixed bits (shown in parenthesis), the test waits for key presses

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  Key code updated after pressing a key ("make" bit is set to register the key down event)

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  Keyboard disconnected, causing the game to lock up, requiring a reset.

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Needs to be verified in real hardware

To activate this debug mode, the Storyware must be set to page 6, and the keyboard needs to be connected to it. Then, power on the game while holding down the red button in the pad.

The game checks the read page 6 value against 0x2a (bits 0b00101010) on the compare instruction at address 000006e4, instead of the usual value 0x3f (bits 0b00111111). The bits for 0x2a cannot be set by flipping pages, since those pages will only cover page sensors in a sequential manner. Presumably, this masked value is set by manually covering page sensors with other objects.

The following sets of 4 bits of data are read by this test mode:

Index	Data	Notes
0x0	M5ID	Always 0b0001
0x1	M6ID	Always 0b0011
0x2	Data size	Always 0b0100
0x3	Pad 1 RLDU	This and the 2 sets below seem to be for a Mega Drive 6-button joypad. Although the Pico pad has a joystick and 2 buttons, these aren't mapped to this data
0x4	Pad 2 SACB	See Pad 1 notes
0x5	Pad 3 RXYZ	See Pad 1 notes
0x6	L& Keyboard type	Unknown, there's logic to check for value 0b111 but without any observable effect
0x7	Caps / Num / Scroll Lock	1 of 3 least significant bits is set when the corresponding lock is active
0x8	Make / Break code	Either 0b1110 or 0b0111 is set to register key down or key up
0x9	Data 7654	Most significant 4 bits of key code
0xa	Data 3210	Least significant 4 bits of key code
0xb		Unknown
0xc		Unknown

Alternatively, for emulators without support for the Keyboard Pico, the page check can be modified to instead test for the Storyware closed (page 0), using patch 000006e6 = 0000. Likewise, the red button needs to be held down during power on. However, this causes the test to fail after loading, since the fixed bits will not be matched.

(Source: QUFB)