20211229 NEC PC 8801 - jsheradin/kb_adventures GitHub Wiki

This board features phenomenal doubleshot ABS caps with Japanese characters. Some of the caps have hand-written notes affixed to the side while others have apparently factory applied stickers.

It has the highest number of different switches within one board that I've seen. There's 7 unique combinations of stem, spring, housing, and latching mechanisms. The switches are NEC linears which appear to be a licensed copy of SMK J-M0404 switches. The clones unfortunately share my main gripes. Both are shallow travel and actuate very early in the press. It's a combination that makes them irksome to me for some reason.

The board's controller is a single discrete logic chip, a demultiplexer. You give it a parallel address and it will set one column high. The rows are directly exposed as outputs. Soarer's Controller is able to handle it just fine.