🚀 go-pugleaf

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without their outdated processors.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.
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