The keyboard I got with my Amiga 2500 had:

  • A broken right alt key,
  • A spotty (at best) return key,
  • And a numpad enter key that wouldn’t stay up, but did work,

I set out to fix all three problems.

broken alt key

Tearing these things down makes an absolute ton of screws. Mitsumi must have shared their alley with a fastener manufacturer. Some of them are JIS, but not all, so use the right screwdriver so you don’t strip them.

screw pile from one keyboard

Since the numpad enter key doesn’t get used much, I swapped the slider from that key onto the return key. This fixed that problem.

I have another keyboard in my collection, which came from the Amiga 3000. It has never worked: it just turns on with the caps lock LED lit up and does nothing at all. I’ll work on it later, but for now, I tore that one down for parts to fix the Amiga 2000 keyboard, which works a lot better.

The Amiga 3000 keyboard and the Amiga 2000 keyboard are basically the same inside. Their sliders are a different shade of blue, but I didn’t notice any difference in feel. I pulled the right alt key, its rubber dome, and its slider, and transferred them to the Amiga 2000 board.

I also transferred the rubber dome from the Escape key of the Amiga 3000 keyboard to the numpad-Enter of the Amiga 2000 keyboard. Unfortunately, I did this over the course of several days and neglected to remember that the slider on the Amiga 2000’s numpad-Enter key was bad.

So now I have an Amiga 2000 keyboard with:

  • A working right alt key,
  • A less spotty return key,
  • And numpad enter key that stays up, but doesn’t work.

Overall, an improvement. Once I tear into the A3000 keyboard again, I will swap over a good slider from that keyboard and make the A2000 keyboard as perfect as it can be. For now, it works great, although it does need a cleaning:

fixed alt key

Will go into more depth to try and diagnose the A3000 keyboard later. So far, all I have tested was to make sure the pigtail harness buzzed out and that all the solder joints on the controller chip were good. I have heard that the capacitors on the keyboard’s logic board go bad, but I don’t see any obvious indication of electrolytic capacitor leakage or other damage.