Subject: Re: serial mouse emulation for macs w/o adb...
To: Hubert Figuiere <Hubert.Figuiere@inforoute.cgs.fr>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 05/22/1996 09:43:21
> 
> A (At) 4:03 22/05/96, andrew watson ecrivait (wrote):
> >i just thought of this while doing something totally unrelated...
> >what if instead of using an adb mouse for macs that adb hasn't been fully
> >implemented a serial mouse was used.

If someone wanted to work on this, and had mouse-protocall specs, I'd
be happy to help them. One of the changes in going to the new serial
drivers is support for "child" drivers on a SCC chip driver. Right
now, we only have a tty child, but the sun3 port also has a keyboard
and a mouse driver. The advantage is that the code is much cleaner.
No if (this port == mouse port) stuff. The disadvantage is that the
connection of the mouse has to be done in the kernel config.

But it should be possable to write a driver to take mouse actions
and turn them into actions for the rest of the kernel. Like
maybe making fake adb events, but I'm not sure if the current adb system
would handle mouse events if there's no adb init.

So if someone's interested, I can help you get started on the serial
port side of things.

> Perhaps this would allow us to have a 3-button mouse without glitches. I
> think might be a good idea if it is really possible.
> I'm not an hardware expert.

I thought we had working 3-button mice? Ken Nakata figured out the multi-
button protocall, and (I thought) most non-three-button-protocall
mice used a fake keyboard for option-left-arrow and option-right-arrow
events (mine does).

Take care,

Bill