Mouse systems M4 Optical Mouse

[Teo Zenios]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "der Mouse" <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 4:31 PM
Subject: Re: Mouse systems M4 Optical Mouse


> > The other optical mouse that requires a special pad came with early
> > Sun workstations.  It looked a bit, well, holographic.  It had a
> > bunch of dots in it that reflected different based on where the mouse
> > was.
>
> Actually, it has lines of one colour running vertically and lines of
> another colour running horizontally, against a shiny background.  To my
> eye, the vertical lines look blue and the horizontal lines grey; I
> suspect there is a reflectance characteristic my eye is not capable of
> picking up there, especially as one of the LEDs in the mouse is giving
> off invisible light (again, to my eye).
>
> The visibly-lit LED looks red to me, and (based on covering each LED in
> turn and seeing which dimension's motion breaks) goes with the blue
> lines (not surprisingly); the invisible-light LED goes with the
> grey-appearing lines.
>
> If you can find suitable inks, printing vertical and horizontal lines
> on a shiny surface should do fine - but beware that such mouse pads
> exist in at least two and I think three different resolutions; while a
> mouse designed for a fine-resolution pad works fine with a coarser pad,
> the converse is not true.  If you want I can approximate the line
> spacing of the mouse pads I have, with a ruler or tape measure and
> some careful counting.
>
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I think I will just hunt for a pad on ebay or find another Amiga mouse to
use, and probably mess with some grids on aluminum foil just for fun.