Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Bought a Soviet Era Gaming Mouse”.
How cool is this? Even the box is amazing. The moment I saw this Soviet air mouse on eBay. I couldn’t help myself. I had to hit buy it now, or at least the closest thing I have to a Buy It Now button ever since they took away my eBay login, which is Justified, because I keep doing things like this but come on come on.
I mean I’ve never seen anything like this before these things just didn’t make their way to the west, and I know what you’re thinking wow Linus an old mouse. Maybe it has non-ergonomic buttons and uh a rubberized ball that, by the way I get to install myself, apparently cool, I wonder if it’s beige, actually Captain Obvious it’s more of a light gray. You probably also think that this is a Serial Port. Don’T you I mean we certainly did, but, as we discovered in order to fulfill our legal obligation of playing doom on this thing, now that we have it in our hands, it was going to take a lot more than just plugging this into a legacy port. On a modern computer, thanks Labs team meet the Mars ukv-01 coordinate input device. We are gon na, have a lot of fun with you and a lot of fun with our sponsor the ridge win big with the ridge’s Hennessy sweepstakes. You can get one bonus: entry for every dollar spent on Ridge products or up to 1 000 for every dollar spent on custom products from Hennessy performance use.
The link below for 10 bonus entries to a chance to win a Hennessy Ford, Bronco and more even before we get beneath the surface, there’s so much to love about this thing I mean ball Mouse huh, ah, is this what a Soviet hand was shaped like also The clicks are rather unique, see, one of them is clicky, and one of them is mushy and from what we’ve seen that’s actually consistent across all of these, I guess so you could tell which button was which, because you’re not sure where your fingers are. I mean, if your hand is shaped like this yeah. Maybe you have completely different fingers like I’ve. Never seen before.
It’S BYOB bring your own ball at no okay, it’s included in the box, but you do have to install it yourself. I got ta say the cable wow that sucks in all seriousness, though other than the age. This is a remarkably well preserved specimen and one of only a handful of mice that was produced in Russia in the late 80s and early 90s. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the ukv-01 was better known as The Martian, and while it could be used with several of the different microcomputers that were available at the time, it’s best known as the mouse for the bk-0010, the most widely produced Soviet home computer, the Vk series was the product of a government-run computer literacy effort kind of like the BBC micro in the UK.
It had 32 kilobytes of RAM and a 16-bit pdp-11 compatible CPU running at three megahertz, though uh. Apparently you could overclock it to a whopping nine megahertz. There was no operating system, just a bios and a focal interpreter in a 32 kilobyte ROM, but you could get a basic interpreter as an upgrade module, which was enough for a huge Homebrew Community to spring up around this machine. Creating and sharing both games and other programs, the Martian then was designed to give the bk-0010 and other late Soviet microcomputers more input options. Kind of, like the older colobach did for the Russian IBM PC clones like the ec1841. It was available in multiple colors and three configurations with two, including cards to interface, with specific computers and the third.
So that’s the one that we got, which was meant to connect to the up Port of the bk-0010. This would have cost 150 rubles at the time which, according to our seller, would work out to about 350 US dollars today, which, funnily enough, is actually what we paid for it. Of course, we didn’t know any of this stuff before we bought the Martian. We just thought it looked cool, let’s take it for a spin or a uh, a roll.
In theory. All we need to connect to a modern computer is a Serial Port, which, surprisingly, is easy enough to find even on Modern gaming rigs. The only challenge is that this is obviously not an external serial connector, so we need to access the header somehow which haha here we go and yeah it was never going to be. That simple, I mean our first clue should have been that none of the holes on the connector were keyed, but we thought who knows.
Maybe they just wanted to save a penny or a kopeck as it were on the connector, and we could just flip it around. No dice there and before you ask yes, we verified that the windows serial Mouse driver is installed, so this is clearly going to be more complicated, but if, at first you don’t succeed, hey there’s always the manual. Unfortunately, here my detective skills tell me that this manual is in some kind of foreign language, and while I’ve got to give them full credit for including not just a nice little drawing of the mouse, but even full electrical schematics, that’s so cool right. This is also in a foreign language and, while a surprising number of folks around here are able to sound out the words from the Cyrillic letters, none of them were sure what any of the words meant. So that doesn’t really help us that much. The good news is that the Russian documentation did point us in the right direction, though this part of the schematic right here looks an awful lot like a pinout, and this diagram in the manual looks like a conversion between two different types of connectors. So between the two drawings and knowing that Russian uses a B for a m sound, we figured that pin 10, probably wanted, plus 5 volt and pin 7 and 8 were probably ground now, both of the drawings show, plus and minus X and plus and minus y. But we figured motion was going to be pretty tricky and we decided to ignore those and start with the buttons thinking.
Those would be more straightforward, which we actually were right. Kh1 and kh2 are indeed our buttons which we were able to verify with a multimeter reading. High, when open and low when closed so armed with that knowledge, all we needed to do was figure out how to get the PC to take in those values, what all the other pins do and how motion is reported. So Jordan from the writing team got as far as grabbing an Arduino from the warehouse before he realized that we have a whole lab full of really smart people who do this kind of thing every day and handed it off to them.
It was at that time that we also started having some luck with our Google searches. We found this post on a Russian language, fpga Forum that once we ran it through Google translate gave us a wealth of historical information about Matt Damon. Sorry, excuse me the Martian, for instance, it confirmed what we had already figured out about the pin out and it expanded on that with some additional technical details. We learned, for example, that one of the adapter cards for the mouse pulled it around 50 times a second and that there was a reset pin, though the reason for the reset pin existing took us some time to figure out full credit to the writing team.
For the effort they put into things, but boy does the lab ever get things done fast? You can see. We’Ve ditched our Arduino for a Raspberry Pi picot to translate the Martian input to standard usb hid signals, and they were apparently able to get us to this point in only about half an hour here we go. This is my first time getting to click on it.
They did all this without me to ah: okay click, what left click right, click! Ah, basically, what you’re looking at here is the picot reads: the voltage on the two pins for the mouse buttons, and then it sees, if there’s a state change, it will either click or unclick the appropriate button and then it Loops back to reading the buttons. This is a super compute intensive way of handling input, but it’s working. There might not be a lot of games that we can play like this, but there are at least some huh.
Oh crap, okay, okay, this is really hard. I don’t think Flappy Bird was this hard look how much he bounces with each click you’re very good at Flappy Bird, of course we’re pretty Limited in terms of the kind of games that we can play with only a left and a right Mouse click and getting Motion working that’s going to take a lot longer than half an hour. I mean we know which pins.
It is it’s the plus minus y and plus minus X. But what does, for example, plus y indicate that we moved up in the past that we are actively moving up right now? Maybe it’s not even a simple binary signal and it’s a variable voltage that indicates speed or distance travel or something like that. Oh wow.
That would be awful good news, though Labs ruled out the variable voltage Theory pretty quickly and they came back with a fairly janky version. 2. That did add motion oh wow, that is um good job Labs team, oh okay! I can kind of move right by doing this. It only moves right. Okay, but oh, I got the shotgun oh now I just have to turn around. Obviously then, while not nothing, our first attempt wasn’t the home run that we hoped it would be, and we weren’t really sure where to go from here. There could be any number of problems at this point. Could we be misinterpreting the signals? Absolutely? Could there be a problem with the hardware? I mean totally it’s 30 years old, no matter how new it looks, and I mean why not both of those things. So at this stage we felt it would be prudent to Cracker open and give her a little exam. Stubby screwdriver now available lttstore.com, oh wow. While we might look at a design like this today and say boy, that’s a pretty rudimentary and simple! You got to give it full credit for longevity. I mean it’s hard for a trace that thick to spontaneously fail from.
You know Heating and Cooling Cycles. Also, these really are two different models of switch. They intended for them to feel different. Input comes from these rotary encoders here, which I mean we gave a light cleaning to, but that did not make any difference whatsoever, because I mean look at this thing. It’S basically Immaculate inside so or probably misinterpreting the signal, which, unfortunately, is a much more difficult fix, of course, with this much invested in the project. Well, what we’re gon na do give up. No, so the labs poured over the schematics and identified the two integrated circuits at the heart of the mouse as the k-561 tm2, which, when you track down a data sheet and then translate, it turns out to be a flip-flop which is basically one bit of memory. A zero or a one, and each of our two ICS, contains two of these flip-flops, along with the ability to clear or reset them, and suddenly that reset pin that we couldn’t figure out before becomes the star of the show.
As it turns out. The flip-flops are telling us which direction or directions that the mouse last moved positive, negative or stationary on each axis. Then all we have to do is reset the flip-flops to their default State. Wait some tiny amount of time and then check them again to see.
What’S happened, rinse and repeat forever. Our Pico then, can take that information and tell our cursor to move slightly in whatever direction we’re meant to be moving now, we’re not sure how often it would have gone through these Cycles on a BK series, but through trial and error we were able to push It to around 4.5 kilohertz or around 4 500 times a second I mean that seems pretty solid right. I should be able to Game On yeah for 4 500 times a second, Maybe oh, hey! I mean there is no question in my mind. This mouse is working. I’M not only able to play I’m able to enjoy playing the game flipping Crazy by the way. Did the shotgun take that guy out from here a little bit wow Mouse pointer, speed? Yes, let us increase wow.
That is still not great. I mean I mean good job Labs team. What I will say, though, is compared to the cable. The ergonomics are far more bothersome. My wrist is already acting up. I’Ve been using it for like five minutes.
This is atrocious. It’S like, we had plastic molding technology, but we didn’t have the technology of what shape is an actual human hand and that’s far from the only problem. While it is usable, it’s really slow. I am all over my desk pad here, and these are both things that we could fix right like if we tweaked the picot to move farther right on each pole, then yeah it could be a lot faster, but that would make the jitteriness go up.
We could get the jitteriness to go away by making it not move as far so it’s not skipping 10 pixels each time but uh then it would be even slower. Oh crap, I’m gon na die. I have eight health. I died. I blame the equipment.
In conclusion, then, while the Martian is technically a gaming mouse in that I did play games on it, meaning our title is not clickbait. Realistically, it’s more just a cool piece of retro technology that never made it to the west and an excuse to show off how the lab is going to help us continue to make better videos. Even if now this is a 350 Mouse plus. However, many hundreds of dollars of labs time all for something that is so much worse than my gpro wireless and so much worse than the Segway to our sponsor circuit specialists. They provide electronic components and tools to the stem community at competitive prices.
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