[Coco] PS-2 Mouse on CoCo

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

jdaggett at gate.net wrote:
> On 11 Nov 2007 at 9:19, Neil Morrison wrote:
> 
>> I can't imagine that is doable. The PS-2 mouse sends a serial stream.
>> The Coco mouse is really a joystick - two pots. You'll need to find a
>> Coco mouse or a T1000 mouse or one of the clones from that era.
>>
>> Neil
> 
> A PS/2 style mouse is doable in hardware. One can fashion a small FPGA to do 
> the PS/2 interface and then translate the position data to a voltage to feed into the 
> Joystick port. 

Dunno if an FPGA would be the best approach here, it's really more of a 
task for a microcontroler :) IMHO of course :) Pick the correct one and 
you get a single chip solution, that can run off 5V (which most FPGAs 
can't :( ).

> Ideally the best solution would be to rewrite the RSBASIC code to handle both a 
> PS/2 mouse and keyboard. Both would free up code space and improve 
> performance of both the mouse and the keyboard. 

While this indeed would be cool, it would also break any program which 
doesn't use the rom routines but scan the hardware directly, games and 
Nitros spring to mind, whilst nitros is fixable, the games are more of a 
problem.

So if it was going to be done, sure do it as an extension, or optional 
replacement.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.