Any mouse-driven GUI's for the BBC B?

[tricky]

I have wondered a few times why no one connected Microsoft serial mice to 8 bit machines.
Too late, too much current or too much voltage I guess.

[RobC]

Back in the day, around 1987-1990, I did loads of work on my BBC using the AMX tools, especially Pagemaker. Yes, 32K of RAM wasn't enough, so the mouse utilities lived in their own 16K ROM, and the Pagemaker software was in two 16K ROM images loaded into sideways RAM banks. One neat thing about it was that it handled relatively high-resolution pages bigger than the screen could handle by paging to and from the floppy disc, which it did quickly enough not to be annoying.

It all worked pretty well for an 8-bit machine. I've still got the mouse and AMX ROMs here, and the machine for that matter!

I loved Pagemaker/Stop Press BITD. There was even a letter in the Micro User that explained how to use its hidden star commands to create your own windowing system and I wrote a very simple desktop GUI using it. I'd done a similar thing with SuperArt but preferred the Pagemaker version as it ran in high resolution (640 x 256) so looked better.

I think Acorn User also produced a WIMP/GUI system but I never got round to using it.

Handyscan for the C64 saved in higher than screen res' too. And though I was playing with this stuff years after anything could have been useful, I never did find an image standard converter to run 'em in DTP packages.

I've still got a Beeb hand scanner and it's actually quite good fun to play with. For the time, the results are pretty good too - I think the relatively high resolution of the Beeb helps.

[sweh]

I think Acorn User also produced a WIMP/GUI system but I never got round to using it.

MicroUser May 1990 started a multi-part series "Harness your WIMP power", but I think it used cursor keys and the COPY key was the button click. Other magazines may also have done their own.

[RobC]

MicroUser May 1990 started a multi-part series "Harness your WIMP power", but I think it used cursor keys and the COPY key was the button click. Other magazines may also have done their own.

Pretty sure it would have been AU as I wasn't a regular TMU subscriber. Possibly early than 1990 too as I'd moved to Arcs by then.

[ThomasHarte]

Slightly late but Googling didn't seem to return anything: are the Stop Press 64* ROMs lost?

* i.e. the hardware solution that added a Master RAM Board and user port to an Electron, plus a version 3.1 of the OS (so, modified from that of the plain Master RAM Board) and a suitably modified ROM copy of Stop Press.

[rharper]

My Desktop ROM software can be operated with a mouse.
viewtopic.php?t=28475
similarly for earlier disc versions:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14533
Ray

[tricky]

Does that mouse ROM support my PS/2 adapter for the Beeb's analogue port?

I'll look myself

[rharper]

Does that mouse ROM support my PS/2 adapter for the Beeb's analogue port?

I'll look myself

It works fine with a 2 x 9pin to analogue adapter but I don't have a PS/2 adapter.
Ray

[tricky]

I made my own, but have replaced two of the wires with 10k resorted as recommended in the thread.viewtopic.php?p=348028#p348028