Hey Jan, I'm delighted that you found my writeup and schematic useful. I'm a big fan of your channel, so seeing this pop up in my feed made my day! And any time a dear old Commodore device is given new life it makes me happy.
Hey Tom, thanks so much for sharing your mouse repair with the world! It was a massive help and hopefully continues to help people bringing their good old 1351s back to life. :)
Thanks to both of you. I have a 1351 on it's way from Germany now, and I am pretty sure I will be following basically the same procedure to give my C128 and 64 a usable mouse! Perhaps I'll record mine as well, not that I think there's too much to add to the great work you both have already done.
Thanks for the mention Jan =D I can't think of a more crusty video I've done lol! The good news is my mouse continued to work ever since! Keep up the great work =D
You are very welcome Chris, I found your video very informative. Plus there's only very few videos available on the issue. Great that your mouse still works, gives me hope that mine will continue to work for some years, too, hopefully. :)
Excellent job Jan. Never expected warping as a cause of mouse failure or that changing the resistance could work around such a mechanical failure. Shout out to the gentleman whose web site clued us into the problem. I will definitely check out what he has to offer. Cheers
Thanks! It might still be a mix of transistors degrading, LEDs degrading, plastic degrading. But I think the plastic is the most reasonable explanation.
The mouse works in either port. Try loading the "better driver" from the disk, and you can select which port you use. :) For some strange reason, when I was young, I mutilated my 1351. I desoldered the cable and used it on an Amiga mouse, and made experiments on the innards so the ball cage is in pieces, and the circuit board is also in pieces. And the IR LEDs and photo transistors are gone... That will be a true resurrection the day I find the time.
This was so much fun to watch! Your enthusiasm and happiness made this as much fun to watch for your adventure as it was for the technical aspects :-D Thank you very much for this video!
Hi Jan, fixed my 1351 mouse following your instructions here. Values for resistance I used same (easy way obviously 😂). I’m using final cartige III works like a charm. When mouse is setup in joystick mode (keep pressed right click during boot) and final cartrige can be configured as joystick to be used, it also works perfect. I played commando with it and it works (not easiest thing to do but it also works) Thank you for posting this it helped a lot to me😊
I would have loved one or these back in the day. I used to have to use GEOS with a terrible joystick. I don't know how I did my school work on it, but somehow, I did.
@@JanBeta I looked it up and I had a grey and black one called "The Boss". I think it was defective because it was impossible to be accurate with it. Somehow I drew stuff in the paint program anyway. I remember the fill tool taking forever to fill an area. I did like GEOS in general though and wanted a DOS port when I moved on to my 286.
It's silly but when I bought a 1351 back in high school I felt like I had a "real" computer with GEOS... I thought it was hilarious that geoPaint had the same patterns as the Macs I saw in the store.
Joystick/1350 mode works great for certain games and programs. I use that to play Alcon (Slapfight) and it works so much better than a regular joystick, and with paint programs like Doodle that don’t natively have mouse support it can work fairly closely to the mouse input in Geopaint. My 1351 still works after 30 years but I do need to replace the left button.
Jan Beta, a very good fix. I agree with you, whatever tolerances that have changed in the last 30 years are unlikely to change further. A permanent resistor fix is simple, elegant, and the most effective. Well done!
Congratulation on saving another piece of classic hardware. Nice! But the oscilloscope is your friend and the Min/Max function of your Fluke is another one. It would be much easier to determine the maximum voltages using this.
All that to get a mouse workin', but so it goes, I actually haven't seen much of the mouse let alone the inside of one so there's that, but good to see that it can be fixed if needed, Danke Jan!
I have experienced that really old LEDs (and opto coupler stuff) for some reason degrade over time, even if not in use. The result is that they get more dim and require more power to perform as expected, and in voltage dividers this can really make a big difference.
Yes, I saw the same effect in some old receivers with LED indicators. Some of them were darker than others in the same unit so I guess there is some sort of degrading going on.
all LEDs do lose some brightness over time, IR LEDs aren't different. Old ones are better than modern versions, you will not find any working mouse from these days working after 20 years for sure. This way of fixing a issue (replacing just resistors) is better than changing a holes in plastic but real fix would be replacing LEDs and resistors if necessary after that.
Yes, something changes, in optocouplers it's the CTR, current transfer ratio that changes. Why, I don't know. I hope in my 1351 I can change out the LEDs and phototransistors or diode or whatever. They seem to be discrete parts.
@@gorjy9610 indeed, modern near-UV and phosphor LEDs lose almost all their brightness in about a decade. My 8 year old wifi router’s LEDs are impossible to see with lights on now, and in the dark you can only barely see them.
Had to replace the infra red diodes on my amiga tank mouse also. The legs seemed to be corroded and must have went all the way up the legs inside the diode. You can still buy the LED's and in my Amiga mouse it solved the problem instantly.
Nice to see your C64 back on the bench 😁 I have an Omega Mouse that seems to be doing the same sort of thing so that gives me something to look at thank you
I have 2 of them: one dead, one working. In the end I only use the "Micromys V5" for it is excellent. Both 1351 are museum pieces now. Well perhaps I attempt an repair after viewing this video.
I found it very useful! :) I am having similar problems with my Atari ST mouse, so I am going to pull it out and measure my voltages to see if I am having the same problem.
Nice detailed repair. I had the same issue. The plastic warps over the years and the signal weakens until it no longer works. I used the quicker method of making the hole that the beams go through to the sensor slightly larger. This solved the problem for me. I wonder how long your repair will last as the plastic will probably continue to warp. The pot method would at last allow adjustments. Someone needs to make a pcb of the board
Thanks! GadgetUK just commented that his mouse (he also did the physical modification) still works today, 4 years later. I wonder how long my repair is going to last but I suspect the warping and degrading of the plastics is a very slow process and I'm probably going to be good at least for some years.
Nice!!! I'm so bummed. I have this same mouse, but the ball itself is missing. You'd think you could just grab any old mouse ball and it would fit, but sadly they do not! This ball appears to be a little larger than others. I wish I could find a replacement but I haven't been able to find it. Jan, if you have a micrometer around, could you by any chance let me know what the size is? Maybe I can find a replacement if I know the exact size.
I measured 250mm. If you can't find one, the balls from the Amiga tank mice should be the same. It's probably easy to find a broken one somewhere and steal the ball. ;)
My Amiga Tank mouse is essentially the same. The cable is fine, buttons work but no movement. Nearly the same internals (same brand and very similar layout) to this as as well...
In my 1351 mouse just the soldering points where the cables come in on the back of the small board with the buttons had become bad. German: "Kalte Lötstellen". Had to redo it three times because of the very big soldering pads and the big amound of old soldering lead on them.
The soldering in my mouse looked a bit sloppy, too. I can well imagine that some develop bad joints after all these years. Good thing you managed to fix it.
Could have measured the existing voltage and used the existing resistor along with math to pick a new resistor voltage. This of course assumes a linear rate, but the transistor detector output should be a set amount of current.
Yes, Tom pointed that out on the website, too. I wanted to make sure to make up for all possible variations so I decided to do it like I did (also, I suck at maths...)
If you know the desired voltage drop across the resistor, the actual voltage drop across it, and the actual resistor value, then you should be able to compute the desired resistor value to get you the desired voltage drop. Since the voltage across the resistor is the current through it multiplied by the resistor value (i.e., V = I * R), you would then have desired_voltage / desired_resistance = actual_voltage / actual_resistance ==> desired_resistance = desired_voltage * actual_resistance / actual_voltage. Now this assumes that the current going through the resistor will be the same regardless of the resistance that you're applying, and there will obviously be limits to that, but the above should get you in the ballpark, I'd think. Of course, there's no substitute for actual experimentation. :-)
@@JanBeta Experimentation certainly is a more sure-fire way of approaching it. So I guess my question is: how do the values you got through experimentation stack up against the values that you would have computed using the above method? I would expect an almost exact match, within some relatively small margin of error (in reality, withing the margin of error of the original resistor values. The ones they used look like the 5% variety to me, based on what looks like gold bands on the end).
I have a draw full of those but for the Amiga and mixed in might be a 1351. Back in the day no one really knew just how meh those were it was all we had. If you moved it and the cursor moved it was cool. I have a draw full of those old Tank Jobbers that do work but I just don't like them so I either use the ones Commodore put out later for the Amiga or have a more modern optical mouse. I will have to look to see if I have a 1351 or not.
Two questions for Jan: 1) What model mouse is the Amiga equivalent? 2) Was that a hummus bowl chilling behind your laptop at 13:45? I couldn't read the language printed on it.
I think the Amiga mouse doesn't have a name, just says Amiga on the label, or just Commodore for some models. They are not compatible with the C64 mice. And yes, it's a hummus bowl. Can't read it myself, text is in hebrew, a friend brought it from a visit in Israel some years ago. It ended up as my trash bin on the workbench.
@@JanBeta Ah okay my mistake. The mouse on my Amiga looked very similar. Back to the days when compatibility was the exception not the norm! But that's some of the fun I guess!
Hey Jan! :) I have to do the same thing on my two 1531 mice. One question left: Can you adjust the sensivity in GEOS to adjust the mouse-speed? Best regards from Bavaria, Matthias ;)
Yes, as @LeftoverBeefcake said, at least in the >2.0 versions of GEOS there is acceleration and sensitivity settings. I remember there were patched third party drivers, too, that worked even better. But I didn't find any yet.
@@JanBeta Thanks, Jan! :) So maybe the user-feeling could be improved a little bit. Well, lets see that after completing the refurbishment of my CBM 8032.
I wonder if it would be possible to make an adapter to plug in a USB mouse into the C=64 paddle port. Reading the USB mouse would be trivial, it's producing the variable voltage that the 64 is expecting that would be the challenge. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking the Raspberry Pi doesn't have any analog outputs. I wonder if a capacitor would be able to smooth out the output PWM well enough to make the C=64 think it's hearing from a 1351.
Ive never repaired a 1351 mouse as mine is still working fine, but This is super interesting because I had read most 1351 mice died due to faulty MOS controller chips. Now I am wondering if the variability of these trimming resistors and componenet degradation isnt what is actually killing some of these mice over time?
Given that MOS has a history of making chips that eventually fail due to chemistry issues, is it not possible that the input impedance of the chip has changed over time?
Great job. I was disappointed, back in the day, that beyond GEOS, I couldn't find any other programs for the C=128 which used my 1351mouse, not even a word processor.
Of course, for ComMAYdore, we can all cherish the fact that technically, the C64/C128 (and probably Amiga) used an optical mouse before it was cool. But as anything that came Tremiel's company, they were optical mice..with balls xD
Yes, but as far as I know they are only available for Amiga/ST mice. If you know of a kit for 1351, let me know. Would be interesting to maybe convert far more common Amiga mice to the C64.
@@bjrnen8505 Everything is possible, but it is much harder than the other way around, and you'd need to have the MCU from the 1351 mouse. Amiga mouse uses only a quad analog comparator (I have used four Schmitt NAND gates) for shaping the signal from optical encoders.
i continude to dowload your video-youtube to my pc software avc any-video convecter/ultimate capture url for dowloading any video from youtube i have the software free crack. tanks..
Nice! I have been using an adapter for USB mice previously but using the real thing again just feels better (at least from a nostalgic point of view). :)
