Mice on 8-bit home computers platforms were not ubiquitous. Almost every popular computer had a mouse option at some point, typically after Apple showed the world how a mouse could be useful as an input device. Because they were not wildly popular, original mice can be expensive. Let's explore some ways to save.
When mice were introduced into the home computer world, they generally had two attractions. First, they were easier to use with drawing/paint programs than joysticks (but less so than true drawing tablets). Second, they made using word processors and spreadsheets easier because the user could very quickly get to any cell compared to cursor keys. But their real breakthrough came with graphical user interfaces that were increasingly making the command line something only for nerds. Clicking on icons, drag and drop, pull down menus and easy selection of objects made them increasingly desirable. MacOS, Amiga Workbench, Apple GS/OS, Atari TOS, GEM, Microsoft Windows, Tandy Personal Deskmate/Deskmate 3, everyone wanted in on the new craze. Then companies like ICOM, LucasFilm, Sierra and Origin would show gamers how a mouse could really work with games.
8-bit home computers were designed before mice became widely available and often did not have the horsepower to run graphically intensive operating systems. They relied on keyboard and joystick. The command line and the text based interface was all they usually needed. Their resolutions were sometimes too low for a good GUI and their graphics hardware was not designed for fast copies of freely definable memory areas. Still, they tried.
Commodore 64 Mice
There were two mice that gained any software support for the Commodore 64, the NEOS Mouse and the Commodore 1351 Mouse.
Before we begin with the "real" mice, first let me discuss the Commodore 1350 Mouse, This device just emulates a joystick and thus will work with any software which supports a joystick. If you move the mouse in a direction that is translated as holding down a joystick in that direction. When you stop moving the mouse, the "joystick" acts like as if that directional has been released. All C64 mice have two buttons, the left button is wired to the fire button on the joystick and the right button is mapped to the POT X input. As the POT X input is looking for resistance values, pressing this button sends either a very high or low value value and the mouse keeps the value opposite when not pressed. The Atari 2600 Keypad and 7800 Controller do similar things to register button presses with resistive inputs. This mouse can be used with any standard Atari-style joystick port.
The NEOS Mouse was the first true mouse and was popular for a time in Europe. It has a joystick mode as well as a true proportional mode and came with an exclusive paint program called Cheese Paint. This mouse plugs into a joystick port and sends a 4-bit packet of data through the joystick directional pins. This has to be read twice for each axis. The left button is connected to the Fire pin but its implementation is odd because the mouse uses that pin as an output to strobe the microcontroller inside the mouse. The right button is connected to the POT X input of the SID chip. Due to the way the joystick and the keyboard share the C64 input lines, this mouse prevents use of the keyboard when it is plugged in. The need to read the joystick port four times, combine the packets and manipulate the left button/strobe signal puts extra strain on the C64's CPU to decode mouse movement. It can be used with MSX computers if rewired.
I could not find any driver for the NEOS native-mode mouse for GEOS but its limitations make it impractical to use with an Operating System. Arkanoid, Arkanoid II, Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt are the only games from the C64's commercial life (1982-1994) which supported the NEOS Mouse.
The Commodore 1351 Mouse is a true mouse which can work like the 1350 by holding down the right button as the system is powered on. Its default proportional mode relies on the SID's analog potentiometer inputs. You must have a working SID or a clone which implements these inputs. The ARMSID does, the SwinSID, X-SID and UltiSID/Kung Fu SID do not. PDsid supports paddles but not the mouse. The C64 Ultimate works but the 1541-Ultimate II+ cartridge does not. Systems that do not use a real SID or other will not work with this mouse in its native proportional mode.
More C64 games support the 1351 Mouse than the NEOS Mouse:
Arkanoid (NTSC only)
Arkanoid II
Centauri Alliance
The Faery Tale Adventure
The Final Chesscard
Lemmings
Lords of Doom
Minesweeper (as found on Magic Disk 64)
Operation Thunderbolt
Operation Wolf (NTSC only)
Shadow of the Evil
The original Arkanoid PAL release only supports the NEOS mouse, I believe there are hacks out there which add support to a PAL-native game. The .g64 NTSC disk image works in a PAL machine with a little shaking at the Taito logo and the intro screen but the game works fine. GEOS 2.0 supports the mouse with a driver. C64 OS also supports the mouse. An EasyFlash conversion of Operation Wolf found in Arcades Compilation #1 by Nostalgia supports both mice.
The homebrew port of Eye of the Beholder supports the 1351 Mouse. I tried the ball mouse shown below and it works very well even on a stock C64. The port does not support a joystick and is in my opinion unplayable with the alternate keyboard controls.
There is an adapter for PS/2 mice from AnyRetro (shown in the photo above) which allows them to be plugged into a C64 joystick port, whereupon they will function like a 1351. The adapter is much cheaper than an original 1351 mouse, even if you need to buy a PS2 mouse. It supports a third button on a PS/2 mouse for determining the mouse sensitivity. It also supports the 1350 joystick mode. It should be used with an optical PS/2 mouse, not a ball mouse, the tracking is too slow with a ball mouse. It is being bundled with an appropriate mouse
for $29.99, I highly recommend buying it bundled.
If you want to use a USB mouse with the C64 Ultimate, ball mice work the best. A USB ball mouse is not exactly something you will find for sale in Best Buy these days but they were made by Dell and HP, so they can be found cheap. I bought a new Dell-branded mouse off eBay for $18.48. It even works okay-enough in Windows 11 if you have nothing better available.
Other games which may play better with a mouse versus a joystick include C64 games originally designed to use a trackball or use pointers for point and click. Your mileage may vary:
Borrowed Time
Cabal
Centipede
Crystal Castles
Deja Vu
Marble Madness
Maniac Mansion
Tass Times in Tonetown
Track & Field
The Uninvited
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
For the SCUMM games (Maniac & Zak) I felt the tracking was just a little too slow with the mouse in 1350 mode for ideal enjoyment. It just takes too far to drag the mouse to get the pointer from one side of the screen to the other. There are EasyFlash versions of Maniac Mansion (Mercury) that supports the mouse well but only on a PAL machine. Another Easy Flash release of Deja Vu + The Uninvited which has hacked in real mouse support and they work well.
Apple II Mice
Apple popularized the use of a mouse in personal computing, having seen what the mouse can do with the Xerox Alto computer. Steve Jobs liked what he saw and implemented a mouse the standard way to interact with the Operating Systems built into the Lisa (1983) and then the Macintosh (1984) computers. These one-button mice sent the quadrature signals from the optical encoders directly to the mouse port, which decoded the signals with the assistance of hardware inside the computer. The Macintosh Mouse, the M0100, has a 9-pin connector but is completely incompatible with 9-pin PC serial ports. The Lisa Mouse, M0050, is compatible with the M0100.
While working on the Lisa and the Macintosh, Apple also developed a Mouse Interface Card for the Apple II, II+ and IIe. Apple released this as the AppleMouse II package, which included the card, the mouse and a paint program called MousePaint. The mice are M0100 compatible but sometimes have the designations A2M4015, A2M4050 or A2M4070 on them. The package was later rebadged as the AppleMouse IIe.
The Apple IIc presented a challenge when it came to mice. The IIc did not ship with a mouse in the box but had a dual joystick/mouse port. This dual port was unique to this machine. Its official mice were the A2M4015 and A2M4035, they differ only in color. The A2M4035 looked like the M0100 and acted like it but it had a little extra hardware inside the mouse so the Apple IIc could properly distinguish it from a joystick. M0100s that indicate on their bottom that they were "Made in Japan" must be modded internally or use a
community-made adapter to work in the IIc. M0100s that say "Made in USA" have updated internals that will allow the mouse to work with the IIc without breaking compatibility with the Lisa, Macintosh or the Apple II Mouse Interface Card. A2M4050 or A2M4070 should work without the adapter, but the M0100 is the most common of these 9-pin mice by far and the cheapest. I paid $45.69 for a "Made in USA M0100" which I believed would work and it did. The Mouse Interface Card is not the cheapest thing to buy these days.
The Apple IIgs came with a mouse as well for its operating system, GS/OS, but that was released in 1986. The Apple IIgs relies on the Apple Desktop Bus which uses a 4-pin connector . These mice have a microcontroller inside them to read the mouse movement and the button and it sends packets through the ADB to the computer. All 1-button ADB mice should be compatible with the IIgs.
One innovation that separates the Apple II mice from Commodore mice is the Apple's mice use of interrupts. Interrupts allow the CPU to spend CPU cycles serving an input device only when an input is triggered rather than the CPU having to periodically poll an input port which may or may not have new data. Apple mice use three kinds of interrupts, one which triggers on mouse movement, one which triggers on the button press and one which triggers on screen refresh. The last permits a cursor to be drawn easily without it flickering on screen. This even works on the Apple II and II+, systems which do not have an official way of telling the rest of the system whether the system is in vertical blank or not.
The Apple IIe, IIc and IIgs implement mice in very different ways but the mouse hardware is transparent to most 8-bit software through the use of firmware routines to interact with the mouse. The Apple II Mouse Interface Card can be plugged into any slot of an Apple II, II+ or IIe and firmware for the mouse routines can be in any slot in an Apple II, II+ or IIe (except slot 3 in a IIe if a memory expansion card is present) The firmware routines were assigned to slot 4 for the early Apple IIc ROM revisions (255 & 0) but were reassigned to slot 7 for the last IIc ROM (3 & 4) revisions.
Apple II Desktop (a.k.a. MouseDesk), Dazzle Draw, GEOS, Print Shop Companion, MousePaint, ProTERM and later versions of AppleWorks support the mouse as well as quite a few games:
Adventure Construction Set
Alge-Blaster Plus!
Archon II (options screen only)
Arkanoid
Arthur
Balance of Power
Borrowed Time
Centauri Alliance
Chipwits
Clue: Master Detective
Crossbow
Design Your Own Railroad
Destiny
Dragon Wars
Fix It
Galacticon
Knights of Legend
Math Blaster Plus (128K version)
Minesweeper (IIe mouse only)
Music Construction Set (rev. 3 & 4)
Ogre
Pinball Construction Set
The Playroom
Read 'N Roll
Rocky's Boots
Sargon III
Shogun
Spell It Plus!
Summer Games
Tass Times in Tonetown
Think Quick!
Universe II
Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?
Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego
Windwalker
Zork Zero
Early versions of MousePaint only look for firmware in slot 4 but later versions are more flexible. This causes problems with the Mockingboard as most games which support it also expect it to be in slot 4. The Mockingboard IIc is especially prone to crashing due to conflicts between the ROM255 or ROM0 which put the mouse routines in slot 4. Adventure Construction Set and Music Construction Set, the only programs which have support for both Mouse and Mockingboard, have no issue with the Mouse Card in slot 7. Unfortunately Music Construction Set does not work properly with Mockingboard 4c in those revisions but it should work with my Cricket!
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