mckay@princeton.UUCP (09/20/83)
Yeah!! Finally a newsgroup form Coco and other 6809er's! Here's a short not terribly objective review of the mouse available for the coco from Radio Shack. I've had my mouse for about two weeks now (for all you Bell Labs sites the RS store in QB mall has a couple of them) and It's not too bad at all. First the bad news. The mouse it nothing more than a "joystick-on-wheels" so to speak. It plugs into the joystick port (you can use two if you like) and has the same 6 bit resolution on each axis. The mouse seems to be a fairly straight forward mechanical device with a steel ball extending from the bottom. Although I have not taken mine apart yet, it looks easy to do which is good 'cause mechanical mice get DIRTY inside from what I've heard. Also the cable seems a bit short but that can be fixed pretty inexpensively. Finally, it costs $50 which is cheap compared to other mice I've heard of but still a lot on my budget. Now the good news. The mouse tracks like a champ! I've writen a couple of "demo" programs in BASIC and I've been very impressed. The level of control the mouse gives you is much better than the joystick for drawing tasks, and it makes pointing quicker and more accurate. Games, take on a whole new dimension when played with a mouse. As some of you may know many of the games available for the Coco use the joysticks as if they were Atari-style "switch-sticks". These games are HARD to play with the mouse. However, a few games like Intercolor's (?) version of centipede DOES use the joystick's full range and is FANTASIC to play with a mouse. The feel is so accurate you can easily hit mites when they come down the screen and chew up cetipede's which run into a posion mushroom and come down at you. It's really neat! I don't have a "missle command" variant yet but that too should be very interesting to play with the mouse. Overall I'm pretty happy with my mouse, as long as you are aware of the above mentioned limitations of the mouse's resolution I'd recommend it as a worth while addition to your coco. Waiting for OS-9, Dwight McKay ...princeton!mckay
dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (09/20/83)
I agree with Dwight McKay about the CoCo mouse, but I must mention one game that I've had an extremely frustrating time with when using the mouse-- Zaxxon. For all I've played it, it would seem to work fine with the mouse: flight X and Y axes are linearly varied according to the joystick position. BUT, it barely tracks the mouse at all! The mouse works fine, because I've written the same BASIC-mouse-tracking-programs. Any clues? Steve Dyer decvax!wivax!dyer sdyer@bbn-unix