A-EON Boing Ball Mouse for Classic Amigas

[matthey]

Cocolino uses a trick to enable use of the mouse wheel and this messes with the normal mouse movement. It sucks, and is a legitimate complaint. I won't ever buy anything that works in a similar way. Basically, original ball mice work better

No problems here with my Cocolino either (AmigaOS 3.9). Check your software for the latest versions. Cocolino.driver 1.2 is on the Elbox web site.

http://www.elbox.com/downloads_cocolino.html

FreeWheel 2.2.2 is on aminet.

http://aminet.net/util/mouse/FreeWheel.lha

[matthey]

TL;DR.  I don't want to deal with a clunky old slow ball mouse, so even with their imperfections I'll continue to use "modern" mice and Cocolino's on my Miggy's.   To each their own.  Cheers, now enjoy a 10 minute video of me drawing circles!  

My tests showed that I wasn't any better at drawing circles. There is probably something to what Thorham is saying but it doesn't affect smoothness as much as accuracy in some cases. It is much more usable than an old C= tank mouse but maybe not as good as a clean pregnant mouse. The Cocolino with optical mouse is lower maintenance without the need to clean. IMO, the biggest disadvantage of the Cocolino is the extra connection and long adapter sticking out from the back of the Amiga. The A-Eon mouse with builtin adapter would help this.

I see what they've done here. The Amiga mouse interface has two 8-bit  counters for horizontal and vertical movement, and they've simply  discarded the least significant bit in both sets of 8 bits, and used  them to signal the status of the mouse-wheel.

It reduces the  accuracy in half, and when you move the mouse slow it will snap into a  perfect horizontal or vertical motion. If you move it slow enough you  should be able to move the mouse across the whole desk without the  pointer moving a single pixel. In some situations, moving the wheel may also cause the pointer to move or jitter.

How did you figure that out? Do all Amiga PC mice adapters have this problem?

It's hardly the end of  the world, but it is an embarassingly poor solution. Why not just send  those signals in serial on a separate pin, just like the CD32 pad does  with all its extra buttons? That was Commodore's own working  solution, ready to be used.

Compatibility maybe? CD32 pads don't seem to cause many problems though.

[matthey]

except the adapter is now simply built in within the plug, which seems as huge as the adapter before, in order to house it. so what is the advantage now, except that you cant replace the mouse, and that you have the sticker, some people value?

Even if the new mouse plug is no shorter than the Cocolino adapter plus PC mouse plug, it is one less connection that can work its way loose. Maybe it would make people like Thorham, who don't like all the Amiga bolt-ons, happy if it wasn't a poor hardware interface design (not verified). It is a disadvantage not to be able to swap to another mouse in case of failure but I have had good luck with the cheap OEM style optical mice. The Amiga sticker doesn't bother me any more than the word Dell or whatever else as long as it is not Microsoft. I guess I am supposed to like the Amiga symbol but the newer Amiga symbols just make me feel depressed. Yea, we got new Amiga branded classic hardware but it is a PC mouse with an Amiga sticker. Amiga innovation at work again. Sigh.

[matthey]

right, one bulky adapter less and one plug less, but its exactly the cable that likes to break especially on edges of such rigid clumsy plugs. id take an extra thought to buy it given the adapter as alternative. to be honest i dont like both that much..

Don't you have a Deneb? I guess you can use a USB mouse directly. Are you using 68k AROS only these days? Is the AROS USB driver available before boot? Did you ever try putting the Poseidon input.device in a custom kickstart for AmigaOS? How does the functionality compare between these? Are many games compatible with a USB mouse?

[matthey]

im using deneb setup mostly with aos, poseidon didnt work with aros yet.

AROS has Poseidon built in though. Is the USB support buggy or are drivers missing for your Deneb? Have you tried the AmigaOS Deneb driver under AROS? I believe the communication for input (mouse, keyboard, gameport) would be Deneb driver to input.device. The Deneb driver should work with the minimal AmigaOS 3.x input.device of which the AROS input.device should be compatible. Poseidon for AmigaOS does include the MOS version of input.device (68k compiled and optional) which has new MOS style device commands which give some new functionality, especially for pre-boot like using the mouse or keyboard in the early startup menu. The AROS input.device decided to use the AmigaOS 4.x style device commands (actually only 1 for now) and modified their input.device and the AROS version of Poseidon for this. It is possible your Deneb device would partially work with AROS (as well as the AmigaOS 3.x input.device). It might be worth a try.

I recently sent Gulliver a new input.device I have been working on to test. It is currently compatible with the MOS style commands for AmigaOS Poseidon compatibility but could be changed to the AROS/AmigaOS 4.x style. This may allow for porting the AROS version of Poseidon back to AmigaOS 3.x and/or allow the new input.device to run under AROS (for test purposes and perhaps better optimization). As is, it should be a drop in replacement for the input.device included with Poseidon. It requires Remus to install in a custom kickstart. It saves some valuable kickstart space as this new input.device is 3768 bytes vs 5544 bytes for the Poseidon input.device. Let me know if you want to test it.

[matthey]

I can't speak for Deneb or AROS or anything like that, but I'd imagine any system-friendly game (i.e., any game you can run from Workbench or that multitasks) would work fine with a standard USB mouse.  WHDLoad stuff, probably not so much.  That's where you'd need to use Cocolino...

Most early games probably turned off multitasking and banged the hardware registers so there is no hope of a software solution to provide USB input to them from a USB card. Some games may use the lowlevel.library, intuition.library (provides input for a window), input.device, gameport.device, keyboard.device, potgo.resource, etc. If they don't turn off multitasking, a software solution could allow them to accept USB input (games which use the intuition.library and/or input.device may work with USB right now). An FPGA motherboard (hardware) could probably emulate the Amiga gameport/mouseport hardware. I expect the Mist FPGA board can get USB input and write to the hardware registers (while multitasking is turned off) which makes all the existing software function correctly with USB input.

[matthey]

I have a Spider 2.0 card, and no not a single game I've played that doesn't run under workbench has worked with the USB mouse.  In fact, the one I ordered from Amigakit (which seems to be USB/Black version of the mouse this thread is about) has been kind of flaky in various computers I've tried it in.

Do you have the USB device driver and Poseidon input.device in kickstart or loaded reset proof? It would be required if booting off a floppy. Most games probably turn off multitasking or throw out the OS and it won't work anyway. USB probably needs to be on a motherboard with an FPGA which can read the USB input and place the processed data in the appropriate Amiga gameport registers to be reliable with all games.

I specifically ordered this mouse for two reasons, 1) the aforementioned compatibility with games, wanted an optical mouse that will work in games.  (haven't tried this yet) 2) Wanted to get the mouse wheel scroll working for browsers.  For some reason though, it's not working.  I have Freewheel in wbstartup++ folder, tried inside Enabled, and outside of it, but still no suck luck.

I can scroll with the scroll wheel fine using my Cocolino with driver and Freewheel.