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"Dead" left click

R

ravuya

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 13, 2003
Messages
58
I finally went out and bought a mouse for my Amiga 1200HD (rescued from Value Village, $8.00), and from what I see either the mouse or my mouse port is damaged. The machine moves the cursor around fine, and when I hold down the right mouse button the menu comes up.

But when I hit the left mouse button, nothing happens in Workbench anywhere. I haven't had time to find another monitor for it (using my development machine's display with a VGA adaptor that can't appear to switch resolutions when running a program other than Workbench) so I can't test to see if it's a Workbench-only problem.

I figure the mouse cord might be damaged, there's a little white bootie on the cord and it's bent at an odd angle behind it.
 
...or maybe you've got a dead click-switch on yer left mouse key. Is it an original Amiga-mouse (the ugly square one??). Those babies had a tendency for getting bad switches. If that's the case, you'll need to break out your soldering-kit and replace the switch - or find a new mouse.

Also, there is one thing that comes to mind, although I've only ever encountered this ONCE EVER..: The male 9-pin plug on the end of the mouse cord (!) has too short connectors, preventing the connectors reaching the pins inside the female plug of the Amiga . . . but like I said, I only ever saw this ONCE, and that was with some lame-butt thirtieth-rate joystick made in Russia, or something...
 
I don't know about a mouse, but I was hooking up a computer once and didn't have the right connector from the keyboard. It had the larger round plug, not the smaller one. As I never throw anything away (at least if it doesn't take up too much space, and may be "useful" at some point...) I still had the cable from a dead keyboard. A few splices later and I was good to go.
Not much use if you want everything to be original, but it'll get you around a bad cord/wrong adapter situation.
Hmm, I can't find it now, but I swore I bookmarked a page that told you what pins were for what on connectors (RS 232, USB, etc. ) but I can't find it right now. Guess I didn't bookmark it.
 
What kind of keyboard does the Amiga 2000/3000/4000 take - maybe the DIN-style PC AT keyboard I think Exluddite is speaking about? A friend of mine once put his Amiga 1200 in a PC tower and bought himself some internal adapter which let him use either a VT100 or if it was a PC AT keyboard; I can't remember.
 
The Amiga 1200 has a built in keyboard, the 2000/3000/4000 are like normal PC with a detachable keyboard. The old Northgate keyboards had switches that allowed you to select Amiga keyboard and would work directly without an adapter when plugged into an Amiga (I use a northgate Ultra on my 2000).

The Amiga mouse has a microswitch for each button that can be replaced if needed, or maybe its just dirty or the plastic isn't making contact correctly (open it and have a look). One mouse I purchased for my 2000 had a simular problem that went away after I blasted contressed air into the thing, could be dust between the contacts.
 
Yeah, I'm well aware that the A1200 normally is an integrated unit. :) But when you disassemble it to put into a tower chassis, the keyboard has to go external in some way. Is the Northgate keyboard more like 25-pin serial or 5-pin DIN? Bah, I could google if I really bothered...
 
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