serial MS ballpoint trackball works with old mb but is not recognized by newer

[vldmrrr]

I have a serial microsoft ballpoint trackball that works very well with epson equity lt V30 laptop. I've recently set up a system with pentium motherboard, actually two, one from biostar, one from DFI. These MB have built in serial ports. The ballpoint is not recognized on either of MB, nor by native MS driver of MS DOS 6.1, neither by ctmouse of FreeDos. The logitech serial mouse works fine on these motherboards. I was wondering if maybe the mouse does not get enough power from serial port on these motherboards. If so, what would be a solution to supply adequate power to a serial mouse?

 

[vldmrrr]

An interesting development is that under OS/2 on DFI motherboard the ballpoint works perfectly fine, while after booting into DOS/FreeDos drivers do not recognize it. So at least it is not hardware problem.

 

[MiaM]

This seems like a perfect use case for one of those "com port analyzer" things with a couple of two color LEDs that indicate polarity (and presence of anything at all) on the handshake signals.
It probably expects a certain setting of the handshake outputs from the computer, using them as a power supply (maybe in combination with transmit data from the computer, via a diode and a smoothing capacitor), and those settings might differ from what other mice expects?

It could also be the case that it can use several handshake lines as a power supply, and the newer boards have weaker RS232 drivers resulting in that you then need to have all outputs set correctly, while with the older PC you might only need one output set correctly.

In general older mice consumed more power (at least within ball mouse / trackballs, of course the optical ones are different). Some of the earliest PC mice even had their own wall warts!

 

[vldmrrr]

I actually checked signals with scope and did not find anything peculiar with those. Also I think the observation in my last post does exclude hardware problem. To recap: the ballpoint connected to the same port on the same motherboard where it is not recognized by DOS/FreeDos drivers is recognized by OS/2 and works fine..

Now I am inclined to think it is timing issue during initialization. The driver manipulates DTR and RTS signals to reset and discover the mouse. The ballpoint might take longer to reset than more modern mice, so on the "fast" pentium motherboard the DOS driver looses patience and reports no mouse, while on old 8088 motherboard (or under slowish OS/2) the ballpoint succeeds to initialize within extended attention span of slow system.

 

[Plasma]

Now I am inclined to think it is timing issue during initialization. The driver manipulates DTR and RTS signals to reset and discover the mouse. The ballpoint might take longer to reset than more modern mice, so on the "fast" pentium motherboard the DOS driver looses patience and reports no mouse, while on old 8088 motherboard (or under slowish OS/2) the ballpoint succeeds to initialize within extended attention span of slow system.

You can test that theory by disabling the cache in the BIOS setup, which will slow the Pentium down quite a bit. There are also various DOS slowdown utilities such as SLOWDOWN.

 

[vldmrrr]

You can test that theory by disabling the cache in the BIOS setup, which will slow the Pentium down quite a bit. There are also various DOS slowdown utilities such as SLOWDOWN.

Good idea, worth a try. And no, neither disabling cache nor `slowdown /x` resulted in detection of ballpoint by either ctmouse or ms mouse driver

 

[Plasma]

I looked into this some more. Shown here, MS-DOS 6.0 and PC-DOS 6.1 both include Microsoft Mouse driver 8.2. The official Microsoft Ballpoint disk has Microsoft Mouse driver 8.1, so it's unexpected that 8.2 doesn't work. However, OS/2 2.11 has Microsoft mouse driver 9.01. So you could try that version.

 

[vldmrrr]

I copied mouse.com from os/2 partition to freedos, but it refuses to run under freedos with error message that os/2 version 2 or later is required.

I've tried running windows 95 installer and once it switches to graphics mode the ballpoint mouse works fine there.

 

[Plasma]

Did you try the 9.01 driver I linked? It's the MS-DOS/Windows version.

 

[vldmrrr]

Very well, 9.01 driver does recognize serial ballpoint under freedos, thank you for working tip.

Maybe one day I will find time and means to snoop at serial port for this driver initialization sequence and update ctmouse to work with this device.