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Tandy 2000 mouse driver
- Thread starter rmartin65
- Start date
jasa1063
Experienced Member
I think this is what you are looking for already on archive.org:
Tandy Digi Mouse Tools : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Drives and tools that came with the Tandy Digi Mouse board.
archive.org
jasa1063
Experienced Member
This diskette for sale on eBay is for the Tandy 1000, but I think it should work on the Tandy 2000 Digi-Mouse/Clock board as well.
jasa1063
Experienced Member
I hope it works for you as well!
kb2syd
Veteran Member
Please let us know if this works.
jasa1063
Experienced Member
Please upload a copy of the diskette to archive.org or here so others can have a copy going forward.
Thanks!
Thanks!
jasa1063
Experienced Member
I doubt he can. He already said that he has "no means to put that file on my T2K's boot disk", so unlikely he can do the other way. Sounds like he has nothing else with a 5.25" disk drive to do any transfers.
I just received the diskette today and no luck. I copied the files to the boot diskette and did a reset. The mouse still doesn't work. Also I tried to do a diskcopy but I get an error message saying that the diskette is in another format.
You are right Timo W.
You are right Timo W.
kb2syd
Veteran Member
The serial ports in the 2000 are NOTHING like the serial ports in a regular PC. Just because it uses the same connector doesn't equate to the same protocols, ports or addresses.
I can understand a mouse driver being specific to a system, but how are the RS232 ports different from any others? My 2000 worked fine with a plain old DC-Modem II and the same Telix program I used with my 1000EX. I don't recall any issues using a mouse either. I'm sure the mouse driver is still on the HD and original floppies, but I let my friend borrow it all back in 1990 so we could team up playing TW-2002. He claims it's still at his parents house and will give it back soon. lol
It isn't, otherwise it would not be RS232.
Not sure what he was refering to... Maybe the Tandy 2000 has different kind of serial ports?
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
The Tandy 2000’s built in serial port is very implemented very differently from a standard PC port (uses an Intel 8251 UART instead of a NatSemi 8250, the addressing and interrupt setup is nothing like a standard PC, etc) so any software that accesses the serial hardware directly instead of through the BIOS would need to be patched…
But this thread is about the Digi-Mouse, which isn’t a serial mouse, so how did this come up?
kb2syd
Veteran Member
I went off the rails in mentioning the serial ports.
The point I was trying to make (and failed) is that don't assume that just because the mouse was the same on the 1000 and 2000 means it was implemented in the same way.
The 2000 is almost completly different than any PC compatible. Look for drivers made specifially for the 2000.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
Okay, that’s fair. It is at least likely the Tandy 1000/PC Compatible driver for the Digi-Mouse is separate from the Tandy 2000 version.
I mean, FWIW, the hardware on the respective adapter cards was almost identical, but the 2000 uses a different interrupt controller setup so at the very least a driver able to work on both platforms would still have to be specifically written to suss out which type it was running on.
jasa1063
Experienced Member
Serial ports do not apply here. This for the Digi-Mouse/Clock board. The Digi-Mouse is basically a Bus Mouse with a DB9 connector. In theory it should operate the same on the Tandy 1000 or Tandy 2000 with a Digi-Mouse./Clock board.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
Yes, that's settled.
If you look in a Tandy computer catalog the mouse itself was advertised under the same catalog number for both Tandy 2000s and their PC compatibles, but each family had their own "Digi-Mouse/Clock" board... an obvious necessity because the Tandy 2000 doesn't have PC compatible slots. According to a Tandy 1000 reference the PC-compatible Digi-Mouse board resides at port 0x2FC and sits on IRQ3; I can't find the hardware address for the Tandy 2000 version, but according to the 2000 Technical Manual there's a dedicated interrupt line on the bus connector, "RATINT12" (not making that up), for the mouse. (Like I said, the Tandy 2000's interrupt controller setup is completely different from a standard PC; it has two 8259A controllers, kind of like an IBM AT, but they're set up as slave devices cascaded off the 80186 CPU's built-in IRQ controller and they're not mapped to the same hardware ports as either a PC or AT.) So... again, it's not possible for these devices to operate *identically* on both platforms.
Anyway. There's nothing that would prevent you from writing a driver binary that would work on either machine, but said driver would have to sniff around and know what it was running on. And I have no idea if the Digi-Mouse driver Tandy distributed with the 1000's version of the board did that.