[comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware] Reading MS Mouse directly. How?

lulu@ucrmath.ucr.edu (david lu) (01/29/91)

Here at UCR we are in the process of revamping a CS hardware
class.  One of the labs that we thought would be fun to do is
to have the students write an assembly program that reads the
mouse directly from the serial port, bypassing the device
drivers.  So ... does anyone know Microsoft's encoding scheme
for their serial mouse?  This information is not in the docs.
Also, what are the parameters of the serial port?  Baud rate?
Stop bits?  Parity bits?  If someone can at least provide the
parameters, I suppose that I can write some code to read from
the port, and try to figure out the return codes myself.  But
if anyone already has that information available, I'd be _very_
grateful.

I guess that I can always try looking at MS's device drivers
with DEBUG, but I'd rather not do that ... :-)

Thank you for any help you can provide.

					- David

---==lulu@ucrmath==---  just another bewildered college student.
David T Lu, Amateur Thinker: lulu@ucrmath.ucr.edu, {ucsd, uci}!ucrmath!lulu
"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle."
					- Arthur Dent, Hitchhiker's