Greetings all

I've got a Toshiba laptop (Satelite 1605CDS? I think) running Windows 98 SE. The keyboard and mouse were completely messed up when I got it, stuck keys, some not working etc. No spares available where I am so I opened the machine, disconnected the keyboard from inside and it runs fine using an external keyboard and mouse. Now here's my problem:

I need to communicate with a peripheral device (STK500 chip programmer) via the serial port, but I've used that for the mouse already. I had thought of getting a USB mouse, but I need the USB port for flash-drive storage. The machine has two unused ports, one for external monitor (output only I assume) and the LPT printer port.

Now, is there any way of using the LPT port for my mouse?

With this in mind, does anyone know of any good resources where I could explore the protocols of different types of ports and their functionality? I know a bit about interrupt addresses etc but would like to find out more. Any information on linking two machines together via standard modems would also be very useful.

Thanking you in advance for any advice.

Cheers4now

StrictlyMartin

Why not just get an external 4 port USB hub?

It will expand your single port to 4.

Go with the USB hub. There's no way you're gonna find drivers that would work with something as strange as a parallel-based mouse. Besides, parallel port has TTL voltage signals (5V), while serial port uses 12V signalling.

Hey there!

Wow, a USB hub! :) For the life of me I never knew that even existed. I wonder if such a thing would work on my machine? It reads USB 2.0 flash-drives (although not sure if they are being read at a slower speed). I will investigate further. Thanks for the advice ;) .

There's no way you're gonna find drivers that would work with something as strange as a parallel-based mouse. Besides, parallel port has TTL voltage signals (5V), while serial port uses 12V signalling.

I thought as much, but just wondered if there was some clever work-around. I had considered trying to build a hardware interface to deal with the different voltage levels, then write some code to somehow read one bit off the parallel port and treat it as a serial port, but not sure if this would even be do-able.

Anyway, seeing as the USB hub would do the job and then some, I'll go with that instead.

Cheers4now

StrictlyMartin