bgr@wild.Rice.EDU (Robert G. Rhode) (07/19/89)
Has anyone ever made or bought an optical mouse for the ST?
bane@mimsy.UUCP (John R. Bane) (08/16/89)
In article <4285@kalliope.rice.edu>, bgr@wild.Rice.EDU (Robert G. Rhode) writes: > Has anyone ever made or bought an optical mouse for the ST? If you have access to any Xerox workstations (known by various names beginning with D like Dolphin, Dandelion, or Daybreak (in their AI nomenclature)), their optical mice can be connected directly to an ST with an oddly wired DB9-DB15 connector pair. I'm slightly prejudiced here, but I think the Xerox optical mouse is the best I've ever used. Unfortunately Xerox doesn't sell them without their outdated processors. If you "find" such a mouse, I can send you the wiring diagram. Most other optical mice you'll see don't generate X and Y pulses; they send serial packets over an RS232-like line. I think it would be possible with a bit of software to make one of those mice work connected to the ST's RS232 port, but then how would you use your modem? Besides, the most popular optical mice (the Mouse Systems version on Suns, for instance) require an expensive mouse pad, and can be painful to use because their coordinate system is the pad, not the mouse (i.e. if you try to use it with your hand rotated relative to the pad, you lose bigtime). The Xerox mouse pad is a fine hexagonal grid of black dots (which can be copied on a Xerox machine (excuse me, a photocopier)) whose orientation doesn't matter to the mouse. -- ARPAnet: bane@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP:...umcp-cs!bane