Hello,

> first of all thank you very much to Thomas and Andreas for your most helpful
> answers!
> 
> On 13-Sep-97 Thomas Gerner wrote:
> >There are 3 button mice available for the Atari.
> 
> Do you have any idea where I could get one? I once tried a 3 button trackball
> but it didn't work. The manual page for msconfig tells me this:
> 
>      When the emulation is turned on, a middle-button event can be generated
>      by simulaneously pressing the left and right buttons. When turned off, a
>      middle-button event is generated by pushing the fire-button of joystick1.
>      Note that you'll need a special type of mouse to use this.
> 
> Do the 3 button mice you mentioned work that way? Has their middle button
> the same effect as pressing fire on joystick 1? I doubt that this is possible
> for a device being attached to the mouse port.

Yes, it works that way. At the TT and the MSTE there is already a connection
from the mouse port to this pin. At a Falcon or Hades this connection is missing,
but one can use an external one. I do so.
The 3 button mouse of the Atari is an optical mouse. I dislike optical mice.
I have no idea where you can get one. May be you will find one if you ask
at the usenet news.

> >Also possible is to change
> >a PC mouse for this purpos. I did this with a genius mouse and this works
> >fine. But you must know where is the hot end of a soldering iron. :-)
> 
> Well, I'm not a wizard of the soldering iron, but a friend of mine is. I
> asked him once about the possibility to change a PC mouse into an Atari mouse
> and he told me that it would be quite difficult. How does your genius mouse
> work? Ist it connected to the Atari mouse port or to one of the serial ports?
> In case of the serial port what do I have to do to get Xdaniver to accept input
> from that device? What hardware changes to the mouse are necessary?

It is connected to the mouse port as discribed above. The Xdaniver do not support
serial mice.
The changes are very simple. Buy a mechanical PC mouse. Open it and remove everything
from the circuit (Leiterplatte) expect the switches an the photoelectic barriers
(Lichtschranken). At the genius mouse, model MyMouse, you must disconnect the
summary wire of the switches from plus and connect it to minus. Then you need a
74HC14 circuit and 4 resistors, for the genius mouse each with 47k. The mouse
contains two photoelectric barrier, each with two open emitter transistors. 
Connect the resistors from the emitters to minus and to the inputs of the 74HC14.
Now you need a thin flexible 9 pin wire. Connect the switches, the outputs of
the 74HC14, plus and minus th the mouse port. Thats all.

> >>Yet another thing: When running NetBSD with a text screen (no X11) I can use
> >>this nice feature which allows me to switch between several screen by
> >pressing
> >>Alt-Fn. After starting X11 it doesn't work anymore. Is there any way to avoid
> >>this?
> >
> >No way.
> 
> Why? Is X11 or the window manager eating the keypress? If I remember right
> it works under Linux (Intel) to switch screens.

The necessary support at the console driver and the server is missing.

> >>Still one more: I spend quite some time fiddeling with the xmodmap program to
> >>get X to understand the input from my german keyboard but it still has
> >>problems with the keys that can produce 4 different characters. For everyone
> >>out there who doesn't know the german keyboard: there is a key which produces
> >>the following characters:
> >
> >Use this map:
> >[...]
> >keysym Alt_L = Mode_switch
> 
> It works fine, but I had to restart the X server to get it to work. A simple
> use of the xmodmap program from within the running server didn't do the trick.
> 
> One thing I forgot: The caps-lock key doesn't work. When testing it with
> xev it tells me that it recognized caps-lock but pressing a letter key still
> produces the lower case letter.

Yes, you are right. I didn't recognice this. But I have no problem with this.
If you dislike it you must look yourself for a solution.

Thomas