9 ms·
What a great game. One neat feature on the MS-DOS version (not sure about Amiga) was that you could plug in a second mouse and play two players on the same scre
by steponlego 4y ago
What a great game. One neat feature on the MS-DOS version (not sure about Amiga) was that you could plug in a second mouse and play two players on the same screen. This was very unique for DOS games.
- doener 4y agoThis was also possible with the Amiga version.
- snvzz 4y agoYup, and I have played it with others.
- alkonaut 4y agoMy guess is that it came from the Amiga and the dos port(?) had to do some pretty unusual magic to make that work on PC?
- actionfromafar 4y agoThere were mice for the serial port, for PCs. So only lesser magic. (One "standard" mouse, like "bus mouse" or PS/2 mouse, and one serial, would have worked fine.) If one mouse goes into the keyboard PS/2 keyboard connector (I think they were the same connector) then yes, very unusual magic.
- StrictDabbler 4y agoThis feature was invented on the Amiga for Lemmings. The Amiga had two joystick/mouse ports fully supported by the OS so it was a natural development. MS-DOS made it much more difficult... using one mouse required that a mouse driver be resident in the 640k base memory and connected via COM or PS/2. Settlers had internal code to access a second serial based mouse but it wasn't straight-forward at all. The DOS port of Lemmings didn't bother.
- mnw21cam 4y agoThe mouse interface on the Amiga was remarkably and elegantly simple too, which would have made it easy to interpret the mouse inputs on a joystick port even if there wasn't built-in support for it. Basically, the mouse buttons were wired directly to pins - the same pins that joystick buttons would be wired to. Then also, the left/right and up/down steps would be indicated by a rising pulse on one pin with a direction indicated on another pin. The same pins that would be used for the left/right and up/down microswitches on a joystick. The way this was implemented by most early mice was to have two sensors on a sense wheel slightly out of phase, so as the sense wheel rotated it would produce a square wave on both wires. When one pin had a rising pulse, the other wire would be high if the wheel was going in one direction, and low if it was going in the other direction.
- unwind 4y agoThis is called a rotary encoder [1] and is still common in various control knobs on electronic devices. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_encoder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_encoder
- vintermann 4y agoThere haven't really been more double mouse games, have there? Sounds like it could have potential, if people got used to it.
- vidarh 4y agoTwo joystick ports was common on home computers years before the Amiga.
- kiicia 4y agoI've been playing serf city with two mouses (some work was needed to set drivers right under dos) and mouse and joystick. it was awesome.