Connecting A Cirque Easy Cat to the Palmtop

Several users have been able to get mouses and trackball pointing devices connected to their Palmtops.

Having recently purchased a Cirque Easy Cat (tm) touch pad for use on an older desktop, I tried making it run on the Palmtop. Here's my recipe for doing this.

I used the HP serial cable and a small mouse driver, MSCmouse.com (18K bytes). To connect the serial cable to the Easy Cat cable I bought both a null modem and a gender changer adaptor from Radio Shack. (current part numbers: 26-264B and 26-260 respectively). The null modem adaptor is needed to undo the null modem that's built into the HP serial cable.

I transferred the MSCmouse.com file to the Palmtop, used the More MENU Applications, Terminate all commands to get to the DOS prompt. I plugged the cable into the serial port, ran the mouse driver program and then started Stereo Shell (a file manager that uses mouse commands), and tapped the Easy Cat touchpad. Nothing happened. Ooops: I forgot that I still had another program running in the background, REMKEY, which takes over the serial port.

Once I had disabled REMKEY, the touchpad started to work. You might like to try the touch pad as an alternative pointing device. It's the same width as a floppy disk and about 3/4 as long.

If you don't want the hassle of carrying around an HP serial cable and a couple of small adaptors, you might replace these three items with a Sagem phone adaptor from Shier Systems. Gottfried Burckhart reports that this adaptor works well.

Two cautions: pointing devices will not work with any of the built-in System Manager software. They only work with DOS programs that are specifically written to handle mouse commands. Secondly, a touch pad device may take some getting used to. It only works with fingers and doesn't work with a stylus.