MouSTer Brings USB to Retro Computers | Hacker News Reader

MouSTer Brings USB to Retro Computers

hackaday.com

55 pointsrcarmo39 comments

If this can be programmed to work as an MSX mouse I could finally attach a mouse to the Roland S-330 sampler I bought used 25 years ago.

I really, really wanted one back in the day but could never find one for a sensible price. At the time they were like rocking horse crap.

EDIT: Doh! Just looked on ebay for the price of a real MSX mouse and the first result is a USB-to-MSX converter specifically mentioning Roland samplers.

I guess I can't have been that desperate for one.

The company making these also has Amiga/ST versions too. http://www.kmtech.co.uk/

Might be a cheaper option than MouSTer but not as neat and pretty.

Other than for nostalgic value, is an S-330 better at anything than your garden variety tablet?

Well strictly speaking it's probably worse than a virtual sampler on a tablet as it's a 12-bit sampler with just 30 seconds of sample time available at the highest quality.

Mine also only has floppy discs to load it's OS and samples from. I believe you can retro fit an SD card reader in place of the disc drive.

On the plus side, it does have 8 outputs, which is handy for drums as you can send different samples to different channels and effects. It has a distinctive sound due to being 12 bit and having good filters that you can tweak over midi. It's somewhat similar to a W30 keyboard but in a rack mount and without the sequencer or SCSI.

You can "cheat" with the sample time by making multiple virtual copies of sounds and having them automatically play forward and then reverse in a loop. There's no time stretch as such but it's possible to split a drum break in that way, assign a virtual sample to each beat and push and pull the tempo.

Not sure I'd recommend anyone buy one over just getting software these days but I have it, and it's fun to use occasionally in a retro way.

There's a DIY page to adapt a PS/2 mouse to a Roland Sampler. Uses a PIC16, and the wiring looks straightforward.

http://synpro.heimat.eu/mousecon.htm

Along these lines - I've always wanted a cheap, universal usb wireless adapter. Something dumb, that just reads the signals off the usb device, transmits them wirelessly to a dumb reciever that uses the info. to reconstruct the data stream on a usb cable.

By 'dumb' I mean it shouldn't care at all about the usb data/protocol. It should just bang 0/1s across the wireless connection.

That reminds me of the old USB/IP project - something I have never used, but which always seemed interesting:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB/IP

FWIW I think you could do that with a pair of Pololu Wixels?

> The Pololu Wixel is a general-purpose programmable module featuring a 2.4 GHz radio and USB. The Wixel is based on the CC2511F32 microcontroller from Texas Instruments, which has an integrated radio transceiver, 32 KB of flash memory, 4 KB of RAM, and a full-speed USB interface. A total of 15 general-purpose I/O lines are available, including 6 analog inputs ...

https://www.pololu.com/product/1336

USB is a host-orchestrated bidirectional protocol. I don’t see how you could possibly replace it with a wireless link that didn’t understand anything about the USB protocol.

The orchestration is between the 2 devices at the ends of the link. The actual link itself could be wireless, fiber, copper, etc. Since its just transporting data and not trying to interpret it at all.

Though, someone higher up said the timings on USB are strict enough that wireless might mess that part up.

Huddlecam used to have a product that was a little like this. They were targeting cameras, but it seems like it also worked for soundcards and possibly some other devices. I have no idea how reliable it was.

By 'dumb' I mean it shouldn't care at all about the usb data/protocol. It should just bang 0/1s across the wireless connection.

The problem, which means any solution will turn out looking like a pair of hubs, is that USB has pretty strict timing limits on how long the host will wait for a response after it has sent a request --- and introducing (often unpredictable) wireless latency can put that time over the limit.

oh? Hmm...I was thinking mostly for stuff like dongles to plug into keyboards or mice, etc. Wonder it would be a problem for them.

...and likely contains more computing power than the computer it's connected to. A USB host controller is not exactly a simple device.

I have a home-made, bespoke version of one of these for my ST. Bought it a few years ago off eBay, I think. It works great. It's nice to have an optical mouse.

This reminds me of my periodic wish to have a USB device that presents itself to the host OS as a hard drive, but is really an iSCSI initiator. Voila: now you can give your Playstation or Xbox arbitrary amounts of fast network storage on the home NAS.

In theory you could do this with an rpi zero w, if you were willing to write the USB gadget adapter code... but I doubt you could get much performance out of it.

AFAIK, the Pi 4 also supports this mode and would offer gigabit performance. Still not terrific, but maybe enough to be usable.

I just had a look at the actual kernel code (https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.10/source/drivers/usb/ga...), looks like you'd have to clone it and re-implement it, I'd go for userspace (possibly via GadgetFS, https://blog.soutade.fr/post/2016/07/create-your-own-usb-gad...).

It looks like this should be possible with any Linux single board computer that supports acting as a USB gadget and has an appropriate network interface. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/usb/mass-storage.html which can be pointed at an arbitrary block device or file. (It appears that UASP support is not included.)

I was very confused on how power was being supplied over RS-232 (DE-9). Apparently this is for Amiga's 9 pin connector which does have a +5V pin.

I am not sure how it works on the amiga, but it was a common trick in the PC world to leach power off the DTR and RTS lines which idle at +12v and can provide a few ma of current per the RS-232 specs.

This is also why a lot of peripherals will fail when you use a knockoff 'rs-232' adapter that only outputs +-5v instead of +-12v

Rs232 says the signals only need to be +-3v minimum, so 5v is well within spec

I wish we also had SD card readers we could attach to old IDE or SCSI controllers instead of old hard drives. Given the low speed ancient controllers and CPUs can do IO at a modern microcontroller could probably do any complex mapping without problems.

such things do exist: https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-SDHC-Adapter-40Pin-Driver/dp/...

https://brainbaking.com/post/2020/09/486-upgrade-sd-hdd/

https://www.drem.info/

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

Cool. Thank you.

These are indeed very common as walrus01 points out. I use the CompactFlash versions in my 286, 386 and 486 set ups.

In addition to the products walrus01 pointed out is the SCSI2SD[0] which I used to retrofit some very old manufacturing systems in a previous job.

0: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD

Not the same thing, but I recently wired a simple audio cable up for my TRS-80 (1980). I can then use the cassette save and load commands to store files on an SD card in my digital audio recorder.

Supports mice and gamepads. You can build one yourself or buy a finished product.

It would be interesting to know what the components are. It's difficult to find a cheap microcontroller than can act as a USB host.

Any STM32F4 microcontroller. Or I believe that new Raspberry Pi microcontroller can operate as a USB host as well -- and its programmable I/Os might be a useful way of interfacing with legacy hardware, too...

Thanks, though I remain curious what's being used here. Looks too small to be an STM32: https://i.imgur.com/vHpcp39.png

Answering my own question here, after a little research. It appears there are lots of 8051 based chips that come with a USB host stack. That's my best guess as to what's being used here. The size/shape match up, at least.

Oh, headline kind of triggered me. Gave me hope for USB storage on Amiga 500. That was an unreasonable thought.

I envisioned a floppy-shaped USB drive that can be inserted into a 3.5" drive.

They actually made a flash based floppy disk for getting data off digital cameras back before usb was common https://docs.sony.com/release/MSACFD2M.pdf

Sadly it required specific drivers on the PC and custom firmware on the device to get it work...

Didn't a version of this have a MemoryStick or Duo port? Probably for the Mavica camera.

I'm not sure of this is what you mean, but they do have floppy shaped "drives" that let you use a USB stick for storage on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087BRYRVY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabc...

Why didn’t they just put USB on them when they made the computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com