PS/2 to homebrew adapter.  Courtesy of an old DIN to PS/2 adapter, the remains of an IDE cable, my dodgy soldering, and excessive amounts of electrical tape.

Give it some juice, and hook up the probes

Result!  Bonus points for telling me what character that is.  Oh, and yes, I did invert the signal.  I got a headache after being upsidedown for 5 minutes.

Why did nobody tell me…?

Well, several melted microchips, a burnt finger, a bunch of messing about with a multimeter and a lot of googling later, I have a question…

Why did nobody tell me that you need a resistor on the base on a transistor to prevent rather large amounts of current flowing.

Oh well, I guess I’ve learned something for next time – PICs don’t like having 200mA or so pulled through their pins.