I’ve had my aluminum iMac keyboard for quite some time now and the only real drawback to using it in windows is the lack of print screen and scroll lock, especially for someone who does a lot of remote work on *nix in their windows session.

Why Apple didn’t just whip up a fix themselves is beyond me,  as this keyboard really could have mass market appeal in much the same way iPods do.  For those new to the game, iPods such as mine had to be tricked into working with a Windows PC, and even then you had to have firewire.  Your reward was the best MP3 player at the time…no one said bleeding edge is easy.

The same holds true for the new iMac keyboards.  Is it too much to expect a keyboard to “just work”, considering the company behind it?  Apparently, yes.  Luckily, there are people around to sort these kind of things out and fix problems that manufacturers artificially create in a vain attempt to move product.  This goes against my methodology that if a person possesses “oppressed” hardware that is purposely crippled, that person will, with enough community and knowledge, un-cripple and enhance a product beyond the manufacturer’s wildest dreams.

References?  See:  RockBox Sansa e200R series (Crippled Real Rhapsody), PodZilla on early iPods (more formats, ogg support, etc.), WRT54G v5 (and the earlier versions, although the v5 was made to get buyers to fork over a premium for a router that could be hacked and have its warranty voided, the WRT54GL…the L stands for Linux, but ironically enough loading Linux onto it will void the warranty).

Worthy of honorable mention is Cisco, because what would the world come to if, lord forbid, you used a NON CISCO GBIC IN A CISCO ROUTER???  IOS has its chips on apocalypse.

But alas, slash rant.

Scancode mappings aren’t the most elegant thing in the world, but they do work in a roundabout hackish sort of way.  How they work is largely unimportant and for the sake of brevity (I think we’re already far beyond that, but i digress) will not be covered in detail at this time.  All that you need to know is that Print Screen and Scroll Lock will work again, as they very well should have from inception!

Here are the mapping details:

F13 -> Print Screen as it should be

F14 -> Scroll Lock as it should be

F15 -> Web: Favorites (may not be universally compatible)

F16 -> Web: Search (may not be universally compatible)

F17 -> Web: Home (may not be universally compatible)

F18 -> Media: Previous Track (may not be universally compatible)

F19 -> Media: Next Track (may not be universally compatible)

YMMV with these, let’s hear some comments on what works / what doesn’t and maybe I’ll fix it if there are enough RFCs.

Take this code and paste into notepad.  Save the file as something.reg, then double click it and let windows know that you would indeed like to import those values into the registry.

DRUM ROLL PLEASE

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
“Scancode Map”=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,37,e0,64,00,46,00,65,00,\
66,e0,66,00,65,e0,67,00,32,e0,68,00,10,e0,69,00,19,e0,6a,00,00,00,00,00