Old trackball won't work on modern laptops

Joerg ( snipped-for-privacy@removethispacbell.net) wrote at Sunday 21. January

Just to verify that the trackball works when connected to your PC: Open Hyperterminal, set it up for 1200Baud, 8bit, no hardware handshake. When you move the ball or press a button you should see some char (non printable) arriving. If not, I would suspect, that the hardware port drivers are not able to deliver enough power.

But the books are better still. A new one's just come out: Rumpole and the Reign of Terror.

Paul Carpenter skrev:

We are talking about two different things, you are talking about a usb to serial converter and yes they change timing.

I was talking about trancievers e.g. max232, wired back to back and _powered_ from USB 5volt to go from rs232 to TTL and back to rs232 levels with a more powerful tranciever

-Lasse

In a bit of a thread hijack, how good is Wine with odd legacy hardware? I've got an ancient Noral 80188 emulator that needs a proprietory ISA card in the PC and will only run under DOS. Would Wine let me use it on a new PC or do you reckon that it would a be a bit too proprietory for that?

I don't think even Linux software will add an ISA slot to your motherboard.

Well yes, I shall have to cross the hardware bridge too but assuming that I have an ISA slot then is Wine likely to allow me use it for the emulator? Of course, I am now less certain that I could purchase a motherboard with ISA on it - do they still make them?

Oh yes, a quick Google has revealed quite a few.

On a sunny day (Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:11:48 -0000) it happened "Tom Lucas" wrote in :

There is a third way, no guarantees, and slow, but I installed

So you get Linux, with in a window MSDOS, and in an other window MS Windows.

As to 'wine' in Linux, it has no problem with IO to the only ISA card I have. (But that one only talks via one IO address). To run the virtualizer you need a _d*mn_ fast PC, else it is too slow.

Sounds interesting, I still have original MS-DOS 6.22 floppies around somewhere so I might even be able to avoid having to do a Win98 install at all. Maybe that would ease some of the speed requirements but the PC I plan to run it on is pretty nippy anyway.

If you are running a dos program, use linux, and dosemu, which comes with linux. I use it to run all of the old OrCAD tools from linux. dosemu can use MSDOG, or it can use FreeDOS. I use FreeDOS, as it is open source, and works better than the real thing.

-Chuck

I guess that could work but would an emulated DOS offer all the features that my equipment might require of the OS? I suppose I might just have to suck it and see.

Yep ;-)

Our 47th Wedding Anniversary is March 31.

...Jim Thompson

My thoughts also. Except the track-ball will need its 12V supply.

...Jim Thompson

I cannot answer that. But what I can tell you is it works with a lot of the old DOS shoot-em-up games.

lpt gets redirected to the lp printer spool, the com ports can be accessed directly if you give dosemu permission. You set up your hard drive as a sub directory somewhere, and the a: drive maps to the floppy.

I wouldn't expect it to work with dongles, or other devices that require direct driving of the parallel port.

Try it, it might do what you need.

-Chuck

That's one of the tests I did. Not characters appear. So yes, it seems

My late father-in-law said on their 43rd: "How many more to go?"

He said that exactly once (didn't go over too well...).

So, let's see. I could whip up a beefy 13.56MHz generator, put a loop under the table where the trackball usually is and then...

Some of my filter design software doesn't come any other way than DOS. Never had any problems running it all w/o a clean DOS boot. The only catches are the occasional "speed overruns", IOW the program relied on some DOS timers or whatever to flag a status but now it blazes by so fast that I can't see what the flags read. And the calc speed of those old programs on new PCs is phenomenal compared to the early 90's.

....

Possibly also a -12V supply as well. Most serial mice were before common usage of transceiver chips with their own power inverters.

-- Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services GNU H8 & mailing list info For those web sites you hate