Hi everyone, Rees here, and welcome to another episode of ctrl-alt-rees.
In this video I’m going to be taking a look at this,
which is a brand new product on the market for Atari and Amiga owners called the mouSTer.
Now what this allows us to do is to connect a modern USB mouse or joypad
to one of these old computers. Of course that isn’t a new concept,
stuff like that has been around for quite a while now.
But I think this one has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it worthy of a closer look.
Just before I start this review I just wanted to put in a very small disclaimer. This mouSTer
was sent to me by the developers retrohax.net specifically for the purpose of this review
and they are a company who I’ve bought from in the past and also featured on the channel in the past.
They’re a small two man operation based over in Poland I believe,
and I assume that the fact that I’ve featured some of their stuff on the channel is how they’ve come
to know about me and a couple of weeks ago they reached out to me on Twitter and said
“would you like this brand new product for a video review?” and of course I said yes.
So I just wanted to be upfront about that. The other thing that they
offered for a review was this brand new magazine that they’re publishing called
“Atari Fan”. Now as you can see this is the very first issue, so if you’re not subscribed and
you’re interested in that make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss it.
So first up let’s take a look at the hardware itself, and there really isn’t a lot to it.
The mouSTer has a female DE9 plug on one end and a USB type A socket on the other.
As well as the expected mice and joysticks,
the USB socket also supports FAT32 formatted flash drives. Insert one for a couple of seconds,
and it’ll create a mouSTer folder with a copy of its current config inside.
Any changes that you make to this file will be read back into the mouSTer the next time the drive
is inserted into it, and stored in its internal flash memory. It allows you to change things
like the mouse emulation type and sensitivity, as well as button mappings for USB gamepads.
The mouSTer can emulate an Atari ST or Amiga mouse as well as the earlier Commodore 1351.
This means that it already supports an impressive range of machines including
all Atari STs (and the Falcon), all of the various Amiga models, and the limited
selection of mouse-driven software released for the 8-bit Ataris and Commodore 64 and 128.
In this video I’ll be testing on the Atari STE and the 2600. According to the config file,
the Atari 8-bit mode hasn’t been implemented yet, but it seems that there will be support
for playing trackball games like Missile Command with a USB mouse before too long.
Just back onto that config file for a moment, it’s also useful to see the current firmware version at
the top, and speaking of firmware, updating it is just a case of downloading and dropping the
file into the same folder and re-plugging the flash drive into the mouSTer for a few seconds.
In a demonstration of just how useful those easy firmware updates can be,
I instantly ran into a problem when I was testing the two USB mice I could find lying around - both
exhibited the same strange behaviour where the cursor would slowly move to the bottom
right corner of the screen, no matter which direction I moved the mouse or how quickly.
I fed this back to the developers who sent over a revised firmware file which fixed the issue,
which was apparently something to do with USB identifiers.
Incidentally, the only wireless USB mouse I had died on me not long ago and I’ve since moved to
Bluetooth, so I didn’t have a wireless mouse to test with, but Retrohax inform me that all
of the wireless mice they’ve tested work fine and that the ST’s mouse port can deliver enough
current without any problems. In the case of the STFM or STE, this means that the mouSTer
and transceiver could be permanently hidden under the keyboard for a very tidy installation.
One very handy feature that I haven’t seen in the other more basic adapters is the ability
to adjust the sensitivity, or mouse speed, and it works great. I always found the Atari
mouse to be very slow, and while there were some boot time utilities that let this be adjusted,
it’s great to just set this in the adapter and not have to worry about it again.
Moving on from the mouse, the mouSTer also supports USB gamepads.
With it being hot swappable just like a real mouse or joystick,
it’s just a case of swapping to the joystick port once the game has booted.
First I decided to try my Xbox 360 controller, and unfortunately it just doesn’t seem to want
to work at all. I’m not sure if this is a compatibility issue with the mouSTer,
or perhaps that the ST’s joystick port can’t deliver enough current to power it.
Apparently the mouSTer can use gamepads with analog thumbsticks to emulate paddles,
and that would have been a lot of fun to try out on my 2600.
Thankfully I also have a couple of Bluetooth 8bitDo controllers, and as luck would have it,
they also work wired when the USB cable is plugged in. The controller works very well
indeed, so I can confirm that USB gamepad support works, although perhaps only with
pads with lower power requirements or an internal battery like these have.
The mouSTer makes it possible to remap any and all of the buttons as you please, so I decided to map
one of the buttons to “up”, a very common mod that I’ve also included in my own joystick adapters,
and provides a jump button for platformers as well as an accelerator for driving games,
making life much easier on these one button systems.
All in all I have to say that after those initial early issues were resolved,
I’m very pleased with the mouSTer, and at just under 25 quid I think it’s priced very reasonably.
So that brings us to the end of the video and to my final conclusions
on the mouSTer - and if you haven’t worked it out already I think it’s
a really great product with a lot of great future potential.
The part that’s really impressed me has been the support from the developers retrohax.net and just
how quickly they’ve managed to jump on some of those bugs that I brought up, and hopefully once
they have ironed out the teething problems with it they can start to look to the future and look to
adding support for more devices. Not only on the peripheral side with support for more pointing
devices and game controllers, but also potentially on the host side as well - there are other old
computers out there that use this DE-9 connector, and while the list of devices that it supports
obviously is pretty impressive already, perhaps it would be great to see support for maybe MSX and
other computers. Which is potentially something they could add with a future firmware update.
It’s a real shame that I didn’t get to play with the paddle support built in
to the mouSTer just on account of my Xbox 360 controller not playing ball.
I’m informed that the PlayStation 4 DualShock controller actually works perfectly fine with it,
but unfortunately I don’t own one of those and I didn’t manage to get my hands on one in time
for filming this video. But of course if I do get a chance to test that out, yet
again I will post an update down in the comments section and potentially even a follow up video.
So thankyou very much for joining me, if you enjoyed this review please do give it a thumbs up,
it helps me to increase the visibility of my channel and helps me to grow my channel
into the future. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions or feedback please do
let me know down in the comments section - it’s always great to hear from people.
And finally, if you want to see more of this kind of content and you’re
not subscribed to the channel, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, retrohax also sent me their brand new magazine
Atari Fan and I’m going to be reviewing that on video very soon so keep an eye out for that one.
So thankyou very much for joining me, and I’ll hopefully see you again next time.