Vintage analog/analogue trackball.

That's a dreadful design.. The only way this could've worked is if the centre-position of the pots represented the absolute centre of the screen - no resolution enhancement there. I know most scroll-wheels used slotted discs & optical encoders, and ok, that may have been prohibitively expensive back then, but even now, cheap rotary encoders use mechanical switches and work acceptably well.. Talking of which - have you seen the £17/$20 DSO Shell oscilloscope off eBay - small, great for travel. Comes as a kit - you haven't done a kit for a while. it runs off 9V but I installed a boost converter module (£1.50/$2 off eBay) in mine so runs off microUSB..

Gordo

My favourite bit about OK Google is that it understands technical words and complex chemical names.

Big Clive

I remember "dragon naturally speaking" was the very latest technology at the time. I am always amazed by speech recognition software. It is an incredible thing for a PC to do. With devices like Alexa and Google the fact it nearly always understands is amazing ! When you consider that a human can speak the same sentence 100,000 times and digitally "speaking" (excuse the pun) no two will ever be identical the success rate is incredible and one of the hardest things to code on a computer. I remember my bbc micro had a dedicated IC just to speak only we have come a very long way !!!!!!!!!

Stuart - my Sblaster 8bit card from 1989 came with Sbaitso parrot We had fun with it back then like this guy I just found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGoxNnDq5yA John

John Harrison

That was also the MIDI port to if memory serves, I remember having one on my old soundblaster that was an ISA card and actually took the old 30 pin simm modules. Those were the days when you had to set jumpers and configure settings in the old "config.sys" and "autoexec.bat". I can remember as a kid editing the autoexec.bat on the display computers in the shops so they would echo something very rude down the screen on boot instead of loading windows. You also had to configure the extended memory for windows to overcome the msdos limitations to I believe. Ahh the memories and thinking back to all that brings me to the sudden and sharp realisation that I am now what I would have called an "old fart" back then and am wandering ever onwards to inevitable senility........................... Argg ............... I'm getting old :-( .

Yes. The old gameport that was basically an analogue to digital converter.

Big Clive

So it’s meant to be plugged on the “Joystick” port that we were finding on sound card back in the day?

Manoel

That's bizarre, I've never seen a trackball that had a limited range of travel.

Michael Dunn

That takes me back to my Amiga days. I had an Atari Trak-ball CX-80 https://www.nightfallcrew.com/wp-content/gallery/atari-trak-ball-cx-80-boxed/20171006_095645.jpg Which was a great quality trackball for the cost. Nothing has come close since. I even bought trackballs designed for arcade cabinets that ran off USB. I LED back lit the ball but they were never as smooth as the Atari.

evilution

Well actually... ;) This trackball differs fundamentally from almost all others I've seen as this outputs an absolute position, instead of the relative position others do. In a standard PC gameport interface the resistance of the X/Y pots are translated into a number between 0 and 511, so this trackball would only work comfortably on screens with a resolution lower than that, otherwise there are certain pixels you just can't get to. It's no wonder you couldn't get along with it, this is no good as a trackball for regular purposes.

Erwin Bierhof

Nice! I still run a trackball. The Logitech m570 is pretty nice :)

Jeff LeBell

Thanks Clive. I hope you can repair the trackball.

Nuts 'n' Proud

Good to see your hands are well on the mend. Don't pick the scabs!

Neil Tonks

that is neat

God 420

Excellent. Keep em coming man. Hurricane coming. Need some in depth circuit analysis to get my mind off that shit. Nuff Said.

I ran a trackball for a while but went back to mice when opticals came around.

Michael Thompson