realoldguy23 wrote:1. Of course PS/2 mice need a driver. In DOS you have to load it, in Windows 9x and following you may not notice that it loads it automatically. But PS/2 mouse ports are implemented in the main board's keyboard controller. So if the main board doesn't have PS/2 mouse it is nearly impossible to add it.
i know that mice need drivers, i was really talking about the the interface itself (hence the mention of i/o cards). i suppose there are some technical reasons why they couldn't just slap one of those controllers on an ISA card to add PS/2 to any machine, so now we have to mess around with brackets and custom pinouts on AT formfactor boards that did support it. and sure, PS/2 mouseport needs IRQ 12, but that could be surely be just reserved by hand in the BIOS anyway in many cases?
and as for the second question, of course there are things like the Q500 optical mouse for serial, and i'd expect that thing to have lower latency than a ball mouse just by design, but i'd be more interested in a comparison of serial vs. ps/2 for the same type of mouse, like the microsoft serial 2.0 mouse vs. the same looking ps/2 variant. i think i've read claims about ps/2 performing better... ps2rate is certainly an advantage, could the polling rate also be improved for serial mice by messing with the serial port settings in windows device manager?