Re: other mice on symbolics

[PMARTIN@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM]

I don't know what signals are produced by the pc-bus-mice, but there is
an additional glitch with using non-Symbolics mice on PE video Symbolics
Lisp Machines.  With the move from the "Lemo" cables to the newer style
in consoles, Symbolics went to using a modular telephone style connector
for the mouse; the biggest available have 8 conductors and the mouse
needs 9 (power, ground, quadrature up-down, quadrature left-right, and
the 3 mouse buttons.  So the newer Symbolics mouse has an encoder chip
it, converting the three mouse buttons into two connnectors.

I sent around a sketch of the pinouts back when I figured them out to
hook up a Xeroc optical mouse to a Symbolics; the encoding chip is
easily available and the whole conversion fits inside many mouse
housings.  Lakin@csli.stanford.edu has an on-line postscript file with
the pinouts of that optical mouse.

I'd like to hear more about the trackball experiments..

Paul