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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

What a great project.

The ST's mouse was/is terrible. Unergonomic and brittle. Back in the 80s I went several months without one, trying to use programs by using the alt-arrow keys to move the cursor because mine broke (and I was broke, too). And then they went and put the mouse/joystick connectors under the keyboard where they were subject to torque and twisting that could cause the leads to break internally, and were a constant hassle to change (lift machine up to swap joystick... accidentally hit reset or power switch on something, or power cable gets pushed out...)

Mice (and floppy drives) are really the weakest link on keeping old STs running. There have been a few adapters around but they usually require either a PS/2 mouse (getting harder to find), or need software drivers. This looks like a great project.

Happy to see some Atari ST content here.

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The only good thing about the ST mouse was that you could use it in confined spaces. It was possible to lift the mouse a bit, twist your wrist, and scuff the pointer across the screen - I called it "ballistic mousing".

I actually built a just-swap-the-pins adapter to use a Xerox Star mouse on my ST.

I can't imagine being able to get my hands on a Xerox Star mouse in the 80s. Hell, I would have given $$ just to see a Xerox Star in person.

The only trouble I ever had with my Atari ST mouse, which I used for about 10 years, was that the axles got dusty. Well, dusty is an understatement. It was a mechanical mouse, with two axles and a ball with a plastic coating of some kind. As you moved the mouse, the ball brought the axles into motion, thus tracking your (more or less) exact movements.

Every few months I had to use my Swiss knife to scrape the accumulated dirt and dust from the axles. With some finesse, so as not to damage the axles.

The mouse could take quite some abuse too. I used to play Arkanoid (also known as Breakout) a lot, at some point. As well as other games which required a lot of clicking and moving around.

Yeah I had a pretty dusty house and had to clean mine probably once a week :-) Gunk collected on those axles pretty bad.

But I had buttons fail, and mouse ports break, both. I have a couple sitting around here which still work, but man are they uncomfortable.

Replacement mice back then weren't cheap, either.

Now that you mention it - I now recall the mouse connectors being underneath my 1040ST. What a horrible place for them, but the back panel was full (SCSI connector, DB-25 connector, MIDI ports, floppy DIN, and more) so they were tight on space.

The STe and later machines added a new set of joystick ports on the left hand side of the machine (south of the cartridge port). But they were "extended joystick", DE-15 ports, semi-compatible with the Atari Jaguar.

But there's no reason they couldn't have put the original mouse/joystick ports on the sides, in a similar way. Put one on each side and then make the choice of which is mouse swappable, to be friendly to left handed users.

Not the best industrial design as it was. Kind of neat at first, but then a pain later.

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