mice - was and still is Re: IBM RT 6150?

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Sunday 20 January 2008 20:21:00 Chris M wrote:

>  of course everyone would opt for an authentic
> original rodent, but how hard could it be to rig
> virtually any mouse to work on, IWT, any computer?

Depends on the mouse, depends on the computer.  Quadrature mice are easy.  At 
worst the "dot pitch" of the mouse won't match the original and the pointer 
will be too fast or too slow.  Serial mice (not just PC serial, I mean any 
mouse that communicates via some sort of serial link) would be harder.  You'd 
have to know what the computer was expecting, and what it might send - 
perhaps there's an "are you there" handshake on initialisation.

You used to get combined PS/2 and Serial mice for PCs that came with a little 
adaptor.  The adaptor only worked with the mice they were intended for, 
because the mouse detected the presence of the adaptor and sent serial mouse 
data instead of PS/2 mouse data.

It might be possible to make a "smart enough" mouse adaptor that would suss 
out what it was plugged into from handshaking signals, and interface an 
ordinary mouse to it.

Gordon