And nobody seems to sell 3-button ball mice any more
(well, not now
I suspect I bought one of the last ball-type mice on the high street when
I needed a quick source of a double phototranssitor to fix a aparkjet
printer. I still have the remains of that mouse (I never throw anything
away...)
optical mice are down to the =A35ea price band), so
you can't exactly buy
one of those, remove the PS/2 controller and add a 74LS14 to make a
quadrature mouse.
Alas not... There have been quadrature-output optical mice, but those are
very rare.
And a lot of modern mice have Useless Serial Botch interfaces which are
much harder to make interface converters for than PS/2 mise. Oh well...
Could you change both parts of the connector (on
the machine and the=20
mouse/adapter) and use, say, a DE9?
The PS2MouseMini is basically a PS/2 socket, a bit of cable and a 9-pin
mini-DIN plug, with a microcontroller hidden in the plug. There's
nothing you can really do with it...
ARGH!!
I'd need an in-line 9W mini-DIN socket to make an adapter cable, or a
chassis-mount socket to mod the A3000 to have a second mouse socket on
one side.
Hunting around, it appears that 9 pin Mini-DINs are not impossible to find.
Farnewll seem to list the cable-mounting plug (bulky, probably not a lot
of use to you) and the PCB socket (could you make a PCB to take it?)
Digikey _also)_ sell a chassis mount socket, a cable with a moulded plug
on oen end and bare wirwes the other [1] and a similar cable with a
socket to bare wires. Of ocurse the problem with Digikey for you and I is
the shipping nad import cheages but the parts do seem to be available.
[1] A friend of mine calls those 'universal connectors'....
-tony