Hardware: Picking a mouse
The Amiga is of course famous for having a graphical interface and that means using a mouse to interact with the system. Im sure it is possible to run an Amiga entirely from the command line. From personal experience, watching people online and from reading old magazine articles, this never seems to have been the norm though.
There are a few sources of mice these days so I thought I’d go over them and give you my thoughts on the methods.
One caveat: New products are appearing and disappearing constantly, so articles like this need to be somewhat generic in nature. I’ll mention specific products when I have direct experience with them.
First and foremost there is the classic mice: These are the easiest to use in the sense that they require no additional hardware and they are what the system was designed to use, hence you get the true authentic experience. Commodore made a few different types over the years: The “Tank” mouse with the hard edges is the most common but they also made rounded mice that were more in line with Apple and PC mice at the time. Any of these will do fine and if you go this route, I’d try to get either a tank mouse or the rounded ones with the matte surface. The Amiga mice with the glossy surface feels very cheap and nasty in my experience.
The big challenge you will face here is that you are buying a 30+ year old mouse and many are in rough condition. While anecdotes are not data, I have bought 4 over the years and all were at least somewhat difficult to use due to wear and tear. Unless you understand how to repair these devices or am getting it from another enthusiast, I’d be hesitant to spend the kind of money they fetch on ebay. The other issue of course is that you will be getting a ball mouse, which is not all that comfortable from a modern perspective.
One last word of warning: While they are not very common, the Commodore 64 mouse uses the same design as the Amiga mouse and is not compatible.
The second option for people with a USB equipped Amiga is to use a USB mouse. If you have hardware that adds a USB port (Deneb, Subway etc.) then you have basically any modern mouse available to you. The problem here is that these cards are not very common and from what I can tell the mouse will only work in OS friendly software (since the USB stack needs to be running). This locks out most (but not all) games.
The last option is to use some sort of adapter. There are a variety of these on the market allowing for both PS2 and USB mice to be connected. Unlike the USB card option above, these adapters convert the signal to something the Amiga can read. They do not generally require any additional software (though options exist for enabling things like scroll wheels if your version of Amiga OS does not support it inherently) and are as plug and play as you can get. The one I use is the Cocolino but there’s a number of these both being sold by Amiga vendors as well as people kit-bashing them in their garage and selling them. I paired it up with a dirt cheap PS2 mouse from ebay and it works like a charm. Do note that even a low resolution mouse will feel very snappy on an Amiga, so you don’t have to go out and buy a really expensive mouse for this purpose.
I would say this is the ideal option these days: You can use a nice laser mouse, it’s very affordable (10–15 dollars on ebay for a mouse and 30–40 for the adapter depending on what you choose) and it “just works”. I have never run into a situation where there was a compatibility issue with a game or program. The one thing I did notice though is that it does not play nice when using an extension cord from the mouse port, but I’ve had no problems when using a joystick switcher.
I do have an alternate option as well which I thought I’d mention just because it is fun: Some years back, I purchased a pair of Playstation controller adapters that a gentleman had kitbashed. There has been a number of these over the years, all with slightly different features. These ones do however have an option for mouse emulation which lets you move the mouse pointer with the analog stick and then use two buttons as right and left click. Not what you’d want for playing Cannon Fodder but surprisingly comfortable when sitting and playing an adventure game and you just want to be able to lean back and relax.
This device isn’t available any more, but I thought I would include it just as an example of all the interesting gadgets nerds have created to solve the mouse problem.
