Minerva ROM
8 February 2025
C64 Light Scanner
2 April 2025
Do you know the Siel and Novel music keyboards for the Commodore 64?
These keyboards are often found without the box, without the software and above all without the interface to connect them to the computer.
That’s exactly my case: I picked up a keyboard which, if we open it up, contains nothing but a PCB with a membrane that is pressed by the key. In short, it’s just plastic with buttons handled as a matrix.
We can find the software online without too much difficulty, while the interface we can build ourselves!
https://ready64.org/download/scheda_download.php
The two keyboards, Novel and Siel, are identical; only the colour changes, and the interface, which works the same way but is designed differently. The Siel one has a pass-through expansion port so that a cartridge can be connected even with the board plugged in.
NOVEL
SIEL
I got a Novel keyboard without an interface, with the intention of building one myself.
I found a website online (see Novel photo) where they had opened this interface and reverse engineered it, but not satisfied with that I wanted to make a PCB with the same components in the same positions as the original board.
You can find the schematic on my GitHub
After having the PCB made by PCBWAY the keyboard still didn’t work properly: there was a connector with a broken pin and it was missing the cover that kept the wires connected to the pins. I used these Flat-Dip connectors to remake the cable, but these have different pins from the one I replaced, so I had to remove the one on the keyboard side as well and replace it to get a pin-to-pin cable.
https://it.aliexpress.com/item/4000082034336.html
In the meantime I also received a Siel keyboard to repair, and with that job I drew up the schematic of this interface too, which is like the previous one but has a pass-through connector for the expansion port, allowing us to use a cartridge together with the interface.
You can also find the schematic of this second interface on GitHub
At the end of this story, the Siel CMK-49 keyboard was in excellent condition; a logic gate on the C64 board had failed. Once it was replaced, everything worked properly again.
When drawing up the schematic I made a mistake, connecting one trace in place of another, but I corrected the schematic, and on my already-printed PCB I had to cut two traces and connect them to the correct points.
Both boards have been tested with both the CMK49 and the Music 64 and they both work.
Now we can fully restore these music keyboards too.
You can find the ready-to-print PCBs on PCBWAY.
Watch the video to see the result and subscribe to the channel to support us, thank you!
