Not sure whether I should use serial mice or PS/2 mice on my retro rig. The rig lacks PS/2 ports and I have a PS/2 to serial adaptor, however I'm not sure whether that works or not. I could buy a serial mouse just to be safe as well as to be period accurate (~1992-ish). What should I do?
Try your ps/2 mouse and adapter first. Serial mice have nothing special about them. .
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wrote:Not sure whether I should use serial mice or PS/2 mice on my retro rig. The rig lacks PS/2 ports and I have a PS/2 to serial adaptor, however I'm not sure whether that works or not. I could buy a serial mouse just to be safe as well as to be period accurate (~1992-ish). What should I do?
If your PS/2 mouse doesn't work with the adaptor then you will need to buy a serial mouse. I got mine new and boxed for about GBP10, including postage, on eBay.
Not all PS/2 mice work with those adaptors - my Intellimouse with scroll wheel from c1998 didn't, and neither did an older Logitech PS/2 mouse.
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2. Compaq Armada M700 laptop, PIII-450, Win98SE
3. Core2Duo E6600, ATI Radeon 4850, Win XP
tayyare is right, it shouldn't hurt to give it a try. Even original, period-correct "MS Mouse" mice shipped with serial-ps/2 adapters.
At least the models from the 90s onwards, if I rememeber correctly. My dad had such a mouse in '95 or so.
Edit: Andy1979 is also right. Some more recent models don't work with these adapters anymore.
That's because the simple adapters are just doing mechnanical conversion. The protocols (ps/2,USB,serial) are
processed by the mouse itself. Except for modern mice adapters, which do contain a tiny ps/2-USB converter chip.
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I actually suggest a serial mouse, just for the simple reason that if you buy a serial mouse you can use it on all IBM PC compatible machines ever made. Even brand new Ryzen boards coming off the line can still have support for them, even if it's through a card.
There are also occasional cases where programs will demand a serial mouse, and refuse to work with anything else. The cases are somewhat limited, but they do most certainly exist.
The Mouse also needs to support the serial protocol for the adaptor to work. Most don't and anything that does probably has a direct serial version anyway.
So may as well just use a serial mouse anyway
Not so fun fact, USB mice are starting to drop PS2 backward compatibility so USB to PS2 adaptors wont be guaranteed to work down the track either
wrote:Not so fun fact, USB mice are starting to drop PS2 backward compatibility so USB to PS2 adaptors wont be guaranteed to work down the track either
Maybe it's time for a little USB-to-PS/2 mouse converter project 😀
Not so important as this, I think. Optical mouse support is more important, and PS/2 optical mice are still available.
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