[PC SPEAKER BUZZING]
Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware,
where we're taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten and obsolete,
like the Power Mouse by ProHance
This is something that you get when you choose the future!
And here we are! This is the ProHance PowerMouse, as I've already mentioned,
and first, I also have to mention that this a donation from Ryan, who is a viewer of LGR.
Thank you very much sir. What have you done?
Anyway this, as I said, is what you get when you choose the future, apparently,
and this particular version, you can kind of see with that little sticker in the top right that's been marked out,
at one point this cost $180
apparently was bought on clearance before that though this was actually a
$295 kit, and it was released as such in 1990 by ProHance technologies based in Sunnyvale, California
But then this was at a time when a two-button Microsoft mouse – just a basic mouse cost $150
The whole big deal about this though is that it is a 40 button device
You see some different mouse and input devices today with a whole lot of buttons
But this takes the cake as far as anything that I have in my collection
It is absolutely absurd! So the whole elevator sales pitch I suppose for this back in the day was that it came with these
Pre-Programmed key definition tables that you can apply to all these different buttons and then swap them out with face plates and whatever
for whatever program you needed it to: spreadsheets, word processors, desktop publishers
Computer-aided design, anything with cad it's supposed to be really good with at least that was the idea
although Info World's review in 1990
said it was "clearly not a candidate for most users [...] hard to hold, hard to maneuver, and awkward to control"
This was just the lowest-scoring thing they reviewed at that time, and the president of ProHance
Kirk MacKenzie actually wrote in to them later and said they missed the whole point
and their users were always saying how much it improved their productivity, and far exceeded expectations
Really defensive there, but you know he's the president of the company
What is he supposed to say? They also made three and twelve and seventeen-button input devices
Some with a lot of buttons, some with track balls on top – didn't really seem to matter because, by the mid-90s
1995 at the latest, the Company was dissolved and ProHance
was picked up by a whole lot of other companies, at least the name was. This product has sort of faded from existence
the inside of this flap here is uh [laughter]
It's pretty entertaining, and also just revealing, too
Just trying to sell you so much on all of these features
Incredibly versatile! Look, it's a mouse, a numpad,
a function pad, joystick, remote device, digitizing tablet. All these things and probably more: the Power Mouse!
So much better than those nice keyboards. Just say no to keyboards! Use the Power Mouse, and yeah
I guess I could maybe see some appeal if you didn't have a numpad on your laptop at the time
but uh you know just get an external numpad, why do you need this? I don't know
I also find this just [laughter]
Look at this
The people that use this, alright, it unleashes your imagination. It's used by handicapped people, construction people, and Steppenwolf
[uproarious laughter]
What a thing to lump it all together with, um
Yeah, the right group Steppenwolf!
I guess you have to be "born to be wild" to use this? Actually [this] was like
1989/1990 when this packaging was made. I guess that was during like the John Kay & Steppenwolf eras?
I don't know what their songs were at that point
You'll also notice this little doohickey attached to it right there with a little crosshair
That doesn't actually come [with] this
So I guess they were just sort of saying hey if you want to add other stuff you could
But then again, you could add that same kind of little crosshair to any mouse. This is just nothing special
Yeah, let's open up the inside it is and so quite
neatly made little package you got to say yeah. Yeah inside you get the manual for the PowerMouse 100 [chuckles]
Reminds me of Powerman 10,000 or 9000, or whatever that band was –
5000? I don't know so yeah, it's it's a manual
This is surprisingly detailed for as simple and easy as they say it is on the outside of the box
you also get this little software package sleeve
so inside of this is what we're gonna get as far as
the software to run it, and you need this because as I said, it is proprietary. It's not like
just generic mouse drivers, Microsoft compatible or anything
So this is the 3.5", 5 ½" version and then it also comes with this
ProHance AutoCAD PowerPak and
This is such a joke, an absolute joke
So this is what made this one cost a hundred dollars more than the models without this. This right here
Is simply just a bunch of configs, like text files to tell it how to use
This mouse with AutoCAD, and the thing is you can set that up yourself. You don't even need this, so that's useless
This little fold-out thingy here that says oh look at all these advantages and things
While it does have a very handy reference for its pre-made
AutoCAD settings, it again
is absolutely useless you can figure that out on your own, or just program stuff yourself. The only other thing that sets this apart
and supposedly makes it worth that $100
is this little faceplate. A little custom made piece of plastic,
that worthless disc, and a little fold-out sheet is a hundred dollars apparently. I don't think so.
But yeah, it does come with the idea of
You know, custom face plates
which is something that was done quite a bit with different, like, keyboard add-ons for instance during the
'80s and into the '90s, and, maybe is still done today, I don't know.
A lot of times it would just be an overlay like paper
but these are actually plastic, and clip on to the front of the PowerMouse itself.
It also comes with the ball, which you have to install
into the bottom there, and we have a different serial port adapter here
so we have the nine-pin to 25-pin, depending on the type of serial if you're going to be plugging into
and then of course we have the mouse itself
And yeah, this is – it's not small [giggles]
It's not small at all, and it's got a lot of buttons: forty of them
So you have two mouse buttons one right here, one right here
these are customized buttons that you can
use for different functions and programs, and also setup, like program your own macros with the software that it comes with,
and this is just like normal keyboard stuff here. Along with some function things like if you have to press F1 you press function F1
Let's just go ahead and demonstrate that and I'll plug this in and see what you get
First things first though, we've going to install the ball
otherwise it's not going to work. So yeah that just goes right in the bottom of there, and yeah, pretty standard mouse stuff
Let's get some software going! Okay, so I've got the ProHance ProMouse plugged in here to my wonderful
Compaq Presario 425, one of my favorite older computers,
and yeah, the software is installed.
Really, just this one disk is needed. The 5.25" is just a
thing if you don't have 3.5" inch drive, and the other disk as I mentioned before, I think, is
pretty well useless if you don't have AutoCAD, so yeah
Let me just show you how to use this thing. So you can either have it configure
This to just set itself up automatically with autoexec.bat and stuff
but I don't want to do that because I have other things on here. I'm not going to be using this frequently
so go over to the ProHance the folder and you'll be able to see here some different things on screen, so we have
a test program, "power.com", which is the most basic version of this driver, "powered", just an editor,
"powersel" is a selector program, and a couple of others for editing, and help for other applications
that I'm not even going to be using, so we're just going to load the "powersel" here and
Yeah, that should just put it right into its default configuration
Which as it is here, this is just sort of generalized setup, which makes the up-down left-right of the mouse movement
equate to what the arrow keys would do since I actually have doskey enabled. So that's bringing up my previously used commands
And that's that's all it does here, however if we bring up the press the menu button
on The PowerMouse itself, it lets you
choose from all of these other key definition tables
And this really is the key to making this thing work with other applications, at least in theory [chuckles]
so if I were to move it over into
mouse mode let me just try edit here for instance
Okay, yeah, so it is –
Edit is treating this just like as a normal mouse so I can
Yeah, I can navigate the readme file that came with PowerMouse and select and click and like do things
That I normally could with any other mouse
What makes this thing supposedly special though right is the fact that it has all of these other buttons
So what the heck do they do? Well of course we got the numpad, which is just literally a numpad. It's the same as this [chuckles]
In fact anything that you can do in here is the same as what you can do on a keyboard
It's supposed to be more convenient over here and I'm not convinced
and let me show you why. So we're going to go into "powersel" here and load the 123
definition file table, whatever
And if I go over here into Lotus 1-2-3, which is version 2.2 that I have on here
It was contemporary at the time this was released more or less
We'll see that I am actually able to
move it around, and really it's still doing this this program doesn't have mouse support, so it's just
giving you pseudo-mouse support by the arrow key movement
and yes, it does squeak
And also it makes this really horrible noise when you go up against the edges of the tables [chuckles]
[horrible beeping grinding noise]
That's pretty bad. So, but yeah, that's that's you're gonna get that sort of by pressing down the arrow keys
it's just this pulls so much quicker and um yeah, I mean you can do Lotus 1-2-3 thingies and
that's cool. It's like already. I've got a numpad right here. I can just change it on the fly
Oh my God. Like, it's so useful and fast
Not really. I for one it is super super super sensitive and yes, you can turn that down. This is on
I think the 200 DPI setting right now, so it's insanely sensitive. Which is why I'm getting that sound
but even if you turn it down, it's still just not
It doesn't feel right because this isn't a mouse cursor
This is literally this [typing on the arrow keys]. This right here feel good, and precise like I know what I'm doing
I will at least show you that, like, there's some of these other things that are pretty cool, like you can insert some rows right here,
or columns like this, or you can adjust the width on the fly. I mean that's
handy in a pinch, but let me try something else, so we're going to go over into
"prohance" once again
And we're going to go into the WordPerfect thing
hopefully it'll have that
Okay, and I opened up the power editor now
and so this you can actually see what it is doing these are all of the functions that it has
mapped out to the ProMouse
so this really is just like a key mapper like you would see in an emulator or
Any other thing that has a key mapper in any program ever. So yeah, you can see that
It's got all of the stuff in normal mode just mapped to the numpad and other
Sort of select functions and whatnot that you would see in WordPerfect
It's just that there's so many things that you have to remember on top of what you already have to remember
and you have the little overlay that goes on there, and it's got the basic one on here right now. It says copy, move
some erase and whatnot, but those change with every time you press function or user or shift or control or any of those
and this manual only helps so much because this is a very generalized thing, like for instance this right here is a
selection of stuff for word processing and
This will give you a reference, but this isn't the same for every word processor in fact title becomes page break, window becomes window
Column becomes tab-set, width becomes margins. I mean some of them makes sense some of them don't
But yeah, WordPerfect right here
Yeah
And, umm, sure
Copy that. Yeah, I can copy things. It's great.
I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing at all
[laughter]
So sure, I guess if you got used to this [giggle] and totally re-learned your entire workflow
maybe this would be easier, but I don't know for two reasons. I don't think this makes any friggin' sense just because this
Everything is clearly laid out. It's a keyboard, man. It's not that hard. Especially for keyboard programs
It's useful if you are recording Macros which
I don't know any for these programs, so I haven't done that but
Again, a lot of these programs have macros built into them, and you can just use them through a keyboard combination
or there's extra software that you can get to just do a macro and make them
for any program that doesn't have them. So you can just have a memory resident thing like the one that it's using right here
And have macros. The other really big reason that I don't understand anything about this is because look at these friggin' tiny little keys
they're so small
and just bsolutely, not enjoyable to use
they also take a lot of pressure to press down. This whole thing is just clumber... clumber? Clumbersome? [giggle]
Clumby? It clumby and cumbersome, and it doesn't feel right when it moves it squeaks. It's heavy, ughhh
The other big area that this seriously fails is
in one of its big selling points using PowerMouse as a mouse, the most versatile mouse on the market? Okay...
The thing is it's not compatible with anything except its own silly drivers
So like if something is looking for a very basic mouse input on comm one
It will probably maybe work
But if it's like so many other things and it's looking for a Microsoft compatible mouse
It's not going to work at all. So I have the mouse definition
You know, whatever. It's on right now
So say if I try to load something like SimCity 2000, which is going to look for a Microsoft compatible mouse
It will not do it. You can try to load, like a Microsoft compatible mouse driver
Like "mouse.com" or executable whatever and it's not going to do anything either
it's just going to confuse it and overload the memory. It screws things up, and it just runs into all sorts of problems
I have been able to run them simultaneously like I have like a regular
Just PS/2 compatible mouse plugged in that'll work in some cases
you can get both drivers to load at the same time, but again you start to run out of memory, and
like conventional memory
Or like if I go into Windows 3.1 here
You just don't have a mouse
at all. There's just no cursor, it completely disables it. You might think, oh well
Maybe there's a driver for this, in fact a manual even mentions that you can install a mouse
driver for Windows
But it's not on this disk. I've checked all the disks. There are no mouse drivers whatsoever for Windows 3
Maybe they were from Windows 2 or something? I don't know. But this thing came out in 1990
and this particular disc is from 1991, so I would think there would be Windows 3 drivers in here
but nope there are not. So it straight up does not work with Windows even though it has a Windows preset
It supposedly maps like this right here to the clock, this right here to the task summary, this right here to tab
Window selection, close window. That would be fine
If it actually worked with Windows, but you try to press any of those in Windows 3, even in this mode
It'll just beep at you a whole lot, and then eventually crash Windows!
Maybe there's one last saving grace of this and that might be, I don't know with games and doing absurd stuff that way
but no
It doesn't do that either. At least for the games that I would want to try it with, just you know because silly reasons
Like doom here for instance okay, you got the menu because again. It's treating the mouse like a keyboard
So you would think that would work fine for the game and it does work for this
Like you can basically just use it as a mouse
but that's doing literally nothing different than you couldn't already do with just a normal mouse
I thought about maybe trying to map it to the numpad
So that at least that would be something kind of interesting like oh, I can move around by pressing these little buttons
but no, Doom doesn't recognize any of these, or any of these. It recognizes the two mouse buttons and this
Even when I put it totally over into keyboard mode, it does this so literally this is no different than just running
a regular mouse in Doom
Again just to sort of illustrate my point here, you can go into Commander Keen and hit use keyboard. It's like okay
well, I want to change that to that and you know that to that which nope then this yet again
doesn't work none of these recognized whatsoever either, and in fact you'd think since the mouse is mapped to arrow keys
that that would work, but nope it doesn't work at all, and now no longer treats it as a keyboard and
now those buttons don't work
Well, that's the ProHance ProMouse. This thing is absolutely boring. You would think for a device with 40 buttons on there
you'd have some sort of cool possibilities
No, just stick to a keyboard and a normal mouse, you'll be fine
What a silly thing. A silly thing indeed, and very much odd. Which is why
I just talked about it, and I hope you enjoyed this video on this thing and if you did then perhaps
you'd like to see some of [my] other LGR Oddware episodes, as well as all sorts of other kinds of videos that I do every
single week every Monday and Friday here on LGR
And, as always, thank you very much for watching!