Just to be clear:

- your original system could use ps/2 mouse on a serial port, until you changed the cd drive. It can still use serial mice. Suggests mouse or adapter as you say, or some effect the cd drive is having

- your 486 boards can use that ps/2 mouse but not serial mice.

So how about this:

- if you put your faster cd drive back in the original system, will the ps/2 mouse on the serial adapter work again?

- on your 486s have you tried different mouse drivers?

I never had any luck with ps/2 to serial adapters on my 386, even with serial-compatible mice, but it's odd how it did work and now it doesn't.

Well i cannot say for sure it was because of CD Drive, because i'm not sure it stop working immediately. But it was the last hardware change before it started doing this.

Anyway i actually just disabled the CD drive but the problem remains.

Yes i tried different mouse drivers on both systems. Cute MOuse always installs the driver but mice don't work. This happens with the combo mouse in serial and a normal serial mouse. In PS/2 everything is fine. This on a 486.

On the 386, serial mice work with both drivers but the combo mouse works with none.

I'm starting to think these are two different problems. Either the adapter on the combo mouse is dead, even though i tried several, or the combo mouse stopped understanding the serial protocol once and for all.

The 486 problem of not accepting serial mice at all may be a different problem, even though i tried several different cables/headers, serial mice, checked the BIOS, checked for conflicts, tried different drivers, etc...

The thing that kills me is that as you can see in the video, that combo mouse sitting on top of that yellow box, was working perfectly in serial and you can see the driver installs just fine.

It seems rather ridiculous that i switch the CD ROMS again just to see if it works, but as i already disabled one to try i don't think i'm gonna get lucky.

Sometimes logic does not seem to apply on these old systems. My head is about to explode.

This is one of the motivators for my MS-DOS Time-Machine project. Too much time gets lost with solving weird and intermittent problems 🙁

most likely the mouse just bit the dust and it just happened on the cd change...

I mostly find retro computers to be very temperamental in an unexplained ghostly way 😀 tighten one screw too tight and inadvertently you have unsettled a vlb card and the contacts are now not aligned properly and the system will not boot. Push a serial mouse into the com port and another variable changes. It can be frustrating but very fun 😀 if i had constant random issues with a mouse or serial port that previously worked i would strip this system back to bare bones minimum to limit the variables and work from there. Plus rollback to different mouse drivers and versions.

With the 486 is not a big deal because i'm using a PS/2 optical mouse anyway, but that combo mouse has something like 800DPI which was being great with the 386.

Can anyone reccomend a really good serial mouse? Or several ones?

carlostex wrote:

Can anyone reccomend a really good serial mouse? Or several ones?

It's hard to go wrong with the tried and true Microsoft serial mouse. I think everyone has at least one of those lying around somewhere.