OF MICE AND 8088s
Can your 8088 or 286 use a mouse?
Sure, as long as it has a serial port on the back. Look at the back of
your computer, and you should see a socket with 9 pins, or 9 holes -- a
row of 4, and a row of 5. That's a DB9 serial port; it's male if
it has pins sticking out, female if it has holes for pins to go in.
(I'm not making this up, I swear.) Some 286's, like the notorious IBM
PS/2, use a small round socket instead, but mostly you'll find DB9 serial
ports. All you need is a serial mouse for your serial port.
(If you've got the little round PS/2-type mouse port, you'll naturally
need a PS/2, or bus mouse.) You can buy a serial mouse at
any electronics or computer store, and some even come with a little
adapter attached, so you can use it with both serial and PS/2-type ports.
If you pay more than 15 or 20 bucks for a mouse, you're paying too much;
I've found generic serial mice for as little as $5 new.
If you get your mouse home, and discover that both the computer serial
port and the mouse have pins, or both have holes, then you're faced
with a gender mismatch -- they're both male (in the first case) or female
(in the second). Not to worry: all you need is a little device known as a
gender changer, which is like two little serial ports (sockets)
glued back-to-back. If both your mouse and serial port are male, you need
a gender changer that's female on both sides; and of course, if both mouse
and serial port are female, you need a gender changer that's male on both
sides. Stick the mouse socket into one side of the gender changer; stick
the other side of the gender changer into your computer's serial port.
Bingo, you're set. Gender changers should only cost you a few bucks.
(Computer health note: before you go plugging cords into the serial
port (or unplugging them, for that matter), turn your computer off. Even
little tiny sparks from active electronic stuff could cause problems with
your computer. Odds are it won't, but why take a chance? Same holds
for all the other stuff -- monitor, keyboard, etc -- plugged into your
computer.)
Of course, I'm assuming all along here that your computer's serial port is
free -- that there's nothing already plugged into it. If it's already in
use -- say, by an external modem -- well, then you're pretty much stuck.
Your options in this case are: (1) shut off the computer and switch
devices each time you need modem-instead-of-mouse, or whatever. That
should become a drag pretty quick. (2) Get funky and adventuresome, and
attach a splitter cable to your serial port -- a cable that splits
into two branches, so it looks like a "Y". Plug the mouse into the end of
one branch, the other device into the end of the other. (If the other
device is a modem, this second branch will naturally need to be a DB25
socket, which -- as you have no doubt already surmised -- is like a DB9,
except it has 25 pins or holes.) I've actually pulled this off with one
of my 286s: I'd use the mouse in a menu program, but when I ran some
dialer software I'd have to stop using (or even moving) the mouse.
(Moving it sends signals down the line that interferred with the modem.)
Once I hung up the modem, I'd just go back to using the mouse again. (I
think I might have had to start the mouse driver again when I
finished using the modem -- read on for more about mouse drivers.)
Even this is not an ideal situation, of course. If you've got a modem
tying up your serial port, consider buying an internal modem. You can get
a used 14.4 modem for peanuts from a newsgroup such as
misc.forsale.computers.modems
. You just take the lid off your computer, stick the modem-card into
a slot on the system board, and you've freed up your serial port for the
mouse.
If you've made it this far, you've taken care of the hardware
side of adding a mouse. But if you've done all that and tried your
favorite
mouse-capable menu or program, you might have found it doesn't show up --
there's no little pointer (the cursor) on the screen that's
controlled by mouse movements. That's because your computer needs some
software to translate mouse-movement signals into signals DOS (and its
programs) can make sense of. Such software is called a mouse
driver. Unless you're running a really old version of DOS, you should
have a mouse driver somewhere on your computer (check the "dos" directory,
naturally). The mouse driver on my old computers is called
mouse.com. As the ".com" suggests, it's a little executable
program, one that stays resident until you explicitly turn it off, or turn
your computer off. You'll want the mouse driver to start up as soon as
you start using your computer, so add a line at or near the end of your
autoexec.bat file that starts the mouse driver. Something like
this:
I've also seen mouse drivers called mouse.sys, though I admit I've never had to use one. It seems to me you'd load that through config.sys instead, by adding a line like this to your config.sys file:
If you're unlucky enough not to have a mouse driver on your computer, you can get free ones off the net. Nagy Daniel has written a free DOS mouse driver called "CuteMouse"; I hear it's been updated by Arkady Belousov. Download it immediately!
(Alternately, you could just get a copy from a computer that does have one. But make sure to send a check to Microsoft if you do.)
And once you've got your mouse up and running, you can even add mouse functionality to programs that didn't originally have it -- thanks to a little utility called Arrmouse. Arrmouse substitutes mouse-movement signals for the signals from the arrow keys that the program would usually expect. So if you've got, say, a certain DOS Mahjongg program that expects you to move around the board using the arrow keys on your keyboard, you could load Arrmouse before starting the game, and then use the mouse to move around the board instead. Your fingers will thank you.
Last updated 7/29/00