how cool is this even the box is amazing
the moment I saw this Soviet air mouse on eBay I couldn't help myself I had to
hit buy it now or at least the closest thing I have to a Buy It Now button ever
since they took away my eBay login which is Justified because I keep doing things
like this but come on I mean I've never seen anything like this before these
things just didn't make their way to the west and I know what you're thinking wow
lonus an old mouse maybe it has not
ergonomic buttons and uh a rubberized ball that by the way I get to install
myself apparently cool I wonder if it's beige actually Captain Obvious it's more
of a light gray you probably also think that this is a Serial Port don't you I
mean we certainly did but as we discovered in order to fulfill our legal
obligation of playing doom on this thing now that we have it in our hands it was
going to take a lot more than just plugging this into a legacy port on a
modern computer thanks team meet the Mars ukv -01 coordinate
input device we are going to have a lot of fun with you and a lot of fun with
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more even before we get beneath the surface there's so much to love about
this thing I mean ball Mouse
H is this what a Soviet hand was shaped like also the clicks are rather unique
see one of them is clicky and one of them is mushy and from
what we've seen that's actually consistent across all of these I guess
so you could tell which button was which because you're not sure where your
fingers are I mean if your hand is shaped like this yeah maybe you have completely different fingers like I've
never seen before it's Bob bring your own ball okay it's
included in the box but you do have to install it yourself I got to say the
cable wow that sucks in all seriousness
though other than the age this is a remarkably well-preserved specimen and
one of only a handful of mice that was produced in Russia in the late ' 80s and
early '90s as the Soviet Union was collapsing the ukv -01 was better known
as The Martian and while it could be used with several of the different
microcomputers that were available at at the time it's best known as the mouse
for the bk- Z10 the most widely produced
Soviet home computer the BK series was the product of a government-run computer
literacy effort kind of like the BBC micro in the UK it had 32 kiloby of RAM
and a 16bit pdp11 compatible CPU running
at 3 MHz though uh apparently you could
overclock it to a whopping 9 mahz there
was no operating system just a BIOS and
a focal interpreter in a 32 KOB ROM but
you could get a basic interpreter as an upgrade module which was enough for a
huge Homebrew Community to spring up around this machine creating and sharing
both games and other programs the Martian then was designed to give the
bk- Z10 and other late Soviet
microcomputers more input options kind of like the older kobok did for the
Russian IBM PC clones like the EC 1841 it was available in multiple colors
and three configurations with two including cards to interface with
specific computers and the third so that's the one that we got which was
meant to connect to the U Port of the BK
0010 this would have cost 150 R at the
time which according to our seller would work out to about
$350 today which funnily enough is
actually what we paid for it of course we didn't know any of this stuff before
we bought the Martian we just thought it looked cool let's take it for a spin or
a uh a roll nice in theory all we need to
connect to a modern computer is a Serial Port which surprisingly is easy enough
to find even on Modern gaming rigs the only challenge is that this is obviously
not an external serial connector so we
need to access the header somehow which
ha here we go and yeah it was never going to be
that simple I mean our first clue should have been that none of the holes on the
connector were keyed but we thought who knows maybe they just wanted to save a
penny or a copc as it were on the connector and we could just flip it
around no dice there and before you ask
yes we verified that the Windows serial Mouse driver is installed so this is
clearly going to be more complicated but if at first you don't succeed hey
there's always the manual unfortunately here my detective skills tell me that
this manual is in some kind of foreign
language and while I've got to give them full credit for including not just a
nice little drawing of the mouse but even full electrical
schematics that's so cool right this is
also in a foreign language and while a surprising number of folks around here
are able to sound out the words from the serc letters none of them were sure what
any of the words meant so that doesn't really help us that much the good news
is that the Russian documentation did point us in the right direction though
this part of the schematic right here looks an awful lot like a pin out and
this diagram in the manual looks like a conversion between two different types
of connectors so between the two drawings and knowing that Russian uses a
B for a v sound we figured that pin 10
probably wanted plus 5 volt and pin seven and 8 were probably ground now
both of the drawings show plus and minus X and plus and minus y but we figured
motion was going to be pretty tricky and we decided to ignore those and start
with the buttons thinking those would be more straightforward which we actually
were right kh1 and kh2 are indeed our
buttons which we were able to verify with a multimeter reading High when open
and low when closed so armed with that knowledge all we needed to do was figure
out how to get the PC to take in those values what all the other pins do and
how motion is reported so Jordan from the writing team got as far as grabbing
an Arduino from the warehouse before he realized that we have a whole lab full
of really smart people who do this kind of thing every day and handed it off to
them it was at that time that we also started having some luck with our Google
searches we found this post on a Russian language fpga form that once we ran it
through Google translate gave us a wealth of historical information about
Matt Dam sorry excuse me the Martian for instance it confirmed what
we had all already figured out about the pinout and it expanded on that with some
additional technical details we learned for example that one of the adapter
cards for the mouse pulled it around 50 times a second and that there was a
reset pin though the reason for the
reset pin existing took us some time to figure out full credit to the writing
team for the effort they put into things but boy does the lab ever get things
done fast you can see we've ditched our Arduino for a Raspberry Pi Pico to
translate the Martian input to standard usb hid signals and they were apparently
able to get us to this point in only about half an hour here we go this is my
first time getting to click on it they did all this without
me Okay click left click right click ah
basically what you're looking at here is the Pico reads the voltage on the two
pins for the mouse buttons and then it sees if there's a state change it will
either click or unclick the appropriate button and then it Loops back to reading
the buttons this is a super compute
intensive way of handling input but it's
working there might not be a lot of games that we can play like this
but there are at least some huh oh
crap okay okay this is really hard I don't
think Flappy Bird was this hard look how much he bounces with each
click oh shoot you're very get a flppy bird sh of
course we're pretty Limited in terms of the kind of games that we can play with
only a left and a right Mouse click and getting motion
working that's going to take a lot longer than half an hour Ian we know
which pins it is it's the plus minus y and plus - x but what does for example
plus y indicate that we moved up in the
past that we are actively moving up right now maybe it's not even a simple
binary signal and it's a very able voltage that indicates speed or distance
traveled or something like that oh wow that would be
awful good news though Labs ruled out
the variable voltage Theory pretty quickly and they came back with a fairly
janky version 2 that did add motion oh
wow that is um good job Labs
team oh okay I can kind of move right by doing
this it only moves right
okay oh I got the shotgun oh now I just have to turn
around obviously then while not nothing
our first attempt wasn't the home run that we hoped it would be and we weren't
really sure where to go from here there could be any number of problems at this
point could we be misinterpreting the signals absolutely could there be a
problem with the hardware I mean totally it's 30 years old no matter how new it
looks and I mean why not both of those
things so at this stage we felt it would be prudent to crack her open and give
her a little exam subie screwdriver now available LTT
store.com oo wow while we might look at
a design like this today and say boy that's pretty rudimentary and simple you
got to give it full credit for longevity I mean it's hard for a trace that thick
to spontane ously fail from you know Heating and Cooling Cycles also these
really are two different models of switch they intended for them to feel
different input comes from these rotary encoders here which I mean we gave a
light cleaning to but that did not make any difference whatsoever because I mean
look at this thing it's basically Immaculate inside so we're probably
misinterpreting the signal which unfortunately is a much more difficult
fix of course with this much inv in the project what were we going to do give up
no so the Labs poured over the schematics and identified the two
integrated circuits at the heart of the mouse as the k561 tm2 which when you
track down a data sheet and then translate it turns out to be a flipflop
which is basically one bit of memory a zero or a one and each of our two ic's
contains two of these flip-flops along with the ability to clear or reset them
and suddenly that reset pin that we couldn't figure out before becomes the
star of the show as it turns out the flip-flops are telling us which
direction or directions that the mouse
last moved positive negative or stationary on each axis then all we have
to do is reset the flip flops to their default State wait some tiny amount of
time and then check them again to see what's happened rinse and repeat
forever our Pico then can take that
information and tell our cursor to move slightly in whatever direction we're
meant to be moving now we're not sure
how often it would have gone through these Cycles on a BK series but through
trial and error we were able to push it to around 4.5 Kilz or around 4,500 times
a second I mean that seems pretty solid
right I should be able to Game On yeah 4500 times a
second maybe oh
oh hey I mean there is no question in my mind
this mouse is working I'm not only able to play I'm able to enjoy playing the
game flipping Crazy by the way did the shotgun take that guy out from here a
little bit wow Mouse pointer speed yes
let us increase wow that is still not great I
mean I mean good job Labs team what I will say though is compared to the cable
the ergonomics are far more bothersome my wrist is already acting up I've been
using it for like 5 minutes this is atrocious it's like we had plastic
molding technology but we didn't have the technology of what shape is an
actual human hand and that's far from the only problem while it is usable it's
really slow I am all over my desk pad here and these are both things that we
could fix right like if we tweak the Pico to move farther right on each pole
then yeah it could be a lot faster but that would make the jitteriness go up we
could get the jitteriness to go away by making it not move as far so it's not
skipping 10 pixels each time but uh then
it would be even slower oh crap I'm going to die I have eight health I
died I blame the equipment in conclusion then while the
Martian is technically a gaming mouse in that I did play games on it meaning our
title is not clickbait realistically
it's more just a cool piece of retro technology that never made it to the
west and an excuse to show off how the
lab is going to help us continue to make better videos even if now this is a $350
Mouse plus however many hundreds of dollars of Labs time all for something
that is so much worse than my GPR wir and so much worse than the segue to our
sponsor if you enjoyed this video maybe check out our full retro review Retro
Retro Retro viiew whatever of the Razer booms slang which I would say arguably
was the last truly high-end gaming ball
Mouse