NCR Decision Mate V - Introduction

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INTRODUCTION
The Mouse Interface has its own microprocessor and firmware,
This offloads the microprocessor of your NCR DECISION MATE \
to a great extent. The Mouse Interface is capable of
transm itting the position of the mouse up to 4000 times s
second. I t is possible to define a range of movement ir
terms of Cartesian co-ordinates. In addition to the positior
of the mouse, the status of up to three switches is included
in the transmission protocol to the computer. A status byte
provides information about function in te g rity checks anc
whether the Mouse Interface is ready to accept or transmit
commands and data. In addition, the status byte records
whether an interrupt has been issued.
There are two methods of checking mouse position and switch
status. The fir s t is simply to poll the Mouse Interface for
the appropriate information. The second method is to make
use o f interrupts issued by the in terface. Normally, this
requires additional hardware in the form o f interrupt
con trolle r circu itry . However, i f you are using your NCI
DECISION MATE V as an 8-bit system, i t is possible tc
u tilize certain characteristics of the Z80A microprocessor
in order to create a lim ited interrupt handling fa c ilit y ,
This is described in the section '’Interrupts*’.
p-System software provides support, consisting of a number
of BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal routines, for the Mouse
Interface. A description of these routines is included at
the end of this document. This description is ready for
in serting as Chapter 8 o f the p-System Plus, Volume 2,
Programming Manual.
The Mouse In terface can, o f course, be used with the CP/M
and MS-DOS operating systems. This Part of the document is
intended for programmers who wish to write their own Mouse
Interface driver routines. The most effective results are tc
be achieved by programs in assembly language.
MOUSE-5