11 Feb
2009
11 Feb
'09
12:27 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Larry Yates <laptoplarry at gmail.com> wrote:
Or an Atar iST mouse, Acorn Archimedes mouse, or many others...
My first Mac+ was given to me without a mouse. At the time Maplin were
selling clone replacement mice for the ST and Amiga, I bought one of
those (I forget which one) and changed the connector. It's very easy. The
only problem is that there's no real way to know which way round to
conenct the 2 quadrature signals for each axis, but if you get it wrong
all that happens is the mouse works backwards. No damage, no magic smoke,
and it's easy to fix.
While in the closet, I also retrieved a MacPlus
that booted A-OK from a
removable hard drive...except I could not find the mouse!
Mac no mouse = no go...
The Apple mice from that era are simple raw X-Y quadrature...
If you really can't locate a genuine Apple Mouse from either an early
Mac or an Apple II (same part), it should be simple to adapt either a
Microsoft Bus Mouse or an Amiga Mouse, perhaps with just a passive
cable adapter.
<http://wombatula.com/electronics/plus/>
If you are a serious hardware hacker, it *might* be possible to hack
out the microcontroller in a "smart" mouse (serial, ADB, PS/2, USB,
It is. The oprical sensorts are much the same in all such mice. The LEDs
are constantly driven (so you can leave those alone), the
phototransistors normally have one side grounds and the other side goes
to the interface chip. In theory you should add something like a 74ls14
to buffer the signals, but it may not ne necessary.
The main problem with doing this is the cable. You need at least 7 wires
in the cale (+5V, ground, 4 quadrature signals and the button), which is
more than in the cable of any smart mouse. So you need to fit a new
cable. Finding a thin and flexile 7 way cable is a challenge. And then
fitting a strain-relief at the mouse end is a second challenge.
-tony