What I wound up doing...
I found a few of the keyboards in the bad bin that just had bad keys, or whatever, took out the electronics, and soldered a much shorter cable directly onto the circuit board.
From the research I've done (in the past 7 hours) I've discovered that keyboard detection is basically a challange and response method. When your keyboard blinks during boot, that's what's going on. The only way to falsefy that is to have a chip that knows how to respond.
Fortunately, I had a pallet of them
God bless bulk.
MPEDrummer