Ben Ketcham wrote:
> 
> Although the DEC "puck mice" certainly have appeal from a historical/Jetsons
> angle, it will be extremely useful to be able to use 15$US generic PC mice
> with Vaxen.  What about using them with one of the *other* serial ports in
> a system, if such are available?  Should then be possible to use a PC mouse
> with *no* additional software, just the regular serial driver (given an X
> server that can use /dev/whatever for mouse input), right?  Someone correct
> me if it is more complicated, I don't see why it should be.  (OK, you'd have

You *do* need additional software.  The mouse sends bytes to the
system.  You need some software to interpret what they mean and place
the corresponding mouse events into an event queue.  The QDSS and QVSS
drivers do this for a DEC mouse attached on the mouse serial port on the
QDSS or QVSS.   Keyboard events go into the same queue.    

There are two ways to make PC mice work:
1) Alter the drivers in the kernel
This should be reasonably easy, at least if you're still using the mouse
port on the display board for input.  If you want to use another port
then various other issues arise, such as how you're going to redirect
the data.
2) Alter X
Hmm... I wonder if you could just use some code from XFree86.

> to be a little sick as well as pretty confident to give up the console
> serial port for this, and even if you could establish the serial rate and
> protocol the mouse wanted, I suppose you might have to do some cable wiring

You don't really need the console port if you're running with a
graphical console.  However, the MicroVAX II console port is a very poor
excuse for a serial port.  It sucks so much that pasting a bit of text
causes it to lose characters.  I don't know if it'd work very well.
(OTOH, the VS2000 console port *really* impressed me.)

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |