Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aries!mcdonald From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Hardware mice pointers Message-ID: <1990Jun16.142023.19048@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 16 Jun 90 14:20:23 GMT References: <136288@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <6537@vax1.acs.udel.EDU> <11876@cbmvax.commodore.com> <2264@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lines: 21 In article <1308@nyx.UUCP> jgriffit@nyx.UUCP (Jonathan C. Griffitts) writes: >In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >>Or you can just write new X and Y values into the hardware mouse pointer >>registers and forget about it. Why haven't hardware pointers caught on, then? >>It can't be the hardware cost or complexity: the necessary hardware has been >>part of cheap 8-bit computers for the past 10 years. > For a hardware mouse pointer to work generally, doesn't the hardware have to have enough mouse pointer memory to allow storage of all the possible mouse pointers the user may want? Any given program might need three or four in addition to the system-wide ones. And this memory has to be writable by a program. So you might need say 32 mouse pointers. And some mechanism to change from one to another as it moves over various windows. How many screen systems have the necessary automatic mechanism to change mouse pointers as it moves? As I move the mouse around my present screen I count nine different mouse pointers. And I'm only running three programs. Doug McDonald