WEBVTT

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how cool is this even the box is amazing

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the moment I saw this Soviet air mouse on eBay I couldn't help myself I had to

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hit buy it now or at least the closest thing I have to a Buy It Now button ever

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since they took away my eBay login which is Justified because I keep doing things

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like this but come on I mean I've never seen anything like this before these

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things just didn't make their way to the west and I know what you're thinking wow

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lonus an old mouse maybe it has not

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ergonomic buttons and uh a rubberized ball that by the way I get to install

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myself apparently cool I wonder if it's beige actually Captain Obvious it's more

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of a light gray you probably also think that this is a Serial Port don't you I

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mean we certainly did but as we discovered in order to fulfill our legal

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obligation of playing doom on this thing now that we have it in our hands it was

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going to take a lot more than just plugging this into a legacy port on a

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modern computer thanks team meet the Mars ukv -01 coordinate

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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

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this thing I mean ball Mouse

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H is this what a Soviet hand was shaped like also the clicks are rather unique

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see one of them is clicky and one of them is mushy and from

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what we've seen that's actually consistent across all of these I guess

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so you could tell which button was which because you're not sure where your

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fingers are I mean if your hand is shaped like this yeah maybe you have completely different fingers like I've

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never seen before it's Bob bring your own ball okay it's

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included in the box but you do have to install it yourself I got to say the

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cable wow that sucks in all seriousness

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though other than the age this is a remarkably well-preserved specimen and

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one of only a handful of mice that was produced in Russia in the late ' 80s and

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early '90s as the Soviet Union was collapsing the ukv -01 was better known

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as The Martian and while it could be used with several of the different

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microcomputers that were available at at the time it's best known as the mouse

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for the bk- Z10 the most widely produced

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Soviet home computer the BK series was the product of a government-run computer

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literacy effort kind of like the BBC micro in the UK it had 32 kiloby of RAM

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and a 16bit pdp11 compatible CPU running

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at 3 MHz though uh apparently you could

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overclock it to a whopping 9 mahz there

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was no operating system just a BIOS and

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a focal interpreter in a 32 KOB ROM but

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you could get a basic interpreter as an upgrade module which was enough for a

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huge Homebrew Community to spring up around this machine creating and sharing

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both games and other programs the Martian then was designed to give the

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bk- Z10 and other late Soviet

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microcomputers more input options kind of like the older kobok did for the

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Russian IBM PC clones like the EC 1841 it was available in multiple colors

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and three configurations with two including cards to interface with

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specific computers and the third so that's the one that we got which was

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meant to connect to the U Port of the BK

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0010 this would have cost 150 R at the

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time which according to our seller would work out to about

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$350 today which funnily enough is

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actually what we paid for it of course we didn't know any of this stuff before

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we bought the Martian we just thought it looked cool let's take it for a spin or

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a uh a roll nice in theory all we need to

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connect to a modern computer is a Serial Port which surprisingly is easy enough

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to find even on Modern gaming rigs the only challenge is that this is obviously

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not an external serial connector so we

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need to access the header somehow which

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ha here we go and yeah it was never going to be

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that simple I mean our first clue should have been that none of the holes on the

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connector were keyed but we thought who knows maybe they just wanted to save a

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penny or a copc as it were on the connector and we could just flip it

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around no dice there and before you ask

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yes we verified that the Windows serial Mouse driver is installed so this is

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clearly going to be more complicated but if at first you don't succeed hey

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there's always the manual unfortunately here my detective skills tell me that

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this manual is in some kind of foreign

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language and while I've got to give them full credit for including not just a

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nice little drawing of the mouse but even full electrical

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schematics that's so cool right this is

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also in a foreign language and while a surprising number of folks around here

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are able to sound out the words from the serc letters none of them were sure what

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any of the words meant so that doesn't really help us that much the good news

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is that the Russian documentation did point us in the right direction though

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this part of the schematic right here looks an awful lot like a pin out and

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this diagram in the manual looks like a conversion between two different types

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of connectors so between the two drawings and knowing that Russian uses a

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B for a v sound we figured that pin 10

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probably wanted plus 5 volt and pin seven and 8 were probably ground now

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both of the drawings show plus and minus X and plus and minus y but we figured

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motion was going to be pretty tricky and we decided to ignore those and start

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with the buttons thinking those would be more straightforward which we actually

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were right kh1 and kh2 are indeed our

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buttons which we were able to verify with a multimeter reading High when open

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and low when closed so armed with that knowledge all we needed to do was figure

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out how to get the PC to take in those values what all the other pins do and

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how motion is reported so Jordan from the writing team got as far as grabbing

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an Arduino from the warehouse before he realized that we have a whole lab full

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of really smart people who do this kind of thing every day and handed it off to

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them it was at that time that we also started having some luck with our Google

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searches we found this post on a Russian language fpga form that once we ran it

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through Google translate gave us a wealth of historical information about

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Matt Dam sorry excuse me the Martian for instance it confirmed what

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we had all already figured out about the pinout and it expanded on that with some

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additional technical details we learned for example that one of the adapter

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cards for the mouse pulled it around 50 times a second and that there was a

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reset pin though the reason for the

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reset pin existing took us some time to figure out full credit to the writing

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team for the effort they put into things but boy does the lab ever get things

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done fast you can see we've ditched our Arduino for a Raspberry Pi Pico to

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translate the Martian input to standard usb hid signals and they were apparently

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able to get us to this point in only about half an hour here we go this is my

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first time getting to click on it they did all this without

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me Okay click left click right click ah

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basically what you're looking at here is the Pico reads the voltage on the two

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pins for the mouse buttons and then it sees if there's a state change it will

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either click or unclick the appropriate button and then it Loops back to reading

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the buttons this is a super compute

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intensive way of handling input but it's

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working there might not be a lot of games that we can play like this

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but there are at least some huh oh

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crap okay okay this is really hard I don't

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think Flappy Bird was this hard look how much he bounces with each

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click oh shoot you're very get a flppy bird sh of

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course we're pretty Limited in terms of the kind of games that we can play with

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only a left and a right Mouse click and getting motion

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working that's going to take a lot longer than half an hour Ian we know

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which pins it is it's the plus minus y and plus - x but what does for example

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plus y indicate that we moved up in the

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past that we are actively moving up right now maybe it's not even a simple

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binary signal and it's a very able voltage that indicates speed or distance

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traveled or something like that oh wow that would be

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awful good news though Labs ruled out

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the variable voltage Theory pretty quickly and they came back with a fairly

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janky version 2 that did add motion oh

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wow that is um good job Labs

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team oh okay I can kind of move right by doing

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this it only moves right

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okay oh I got the shotgun oh now I just have to turn

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around obviously then while not nothing

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our first attempt wasn't the home run that we hoped it would be and we weren't

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really sure where to go from here there could be any number of problems at this

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point could we be misinterpreting the signals absolutely could there be a

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problem with the hardware I mean totally it's 30 years old no matter how new it

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looks and I mean why not both of those

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things so at this stage we felt it would be prudent to crack her open and give

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her a little exam subie screwdriver now available LTT

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store.com oo wow while we might look at

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a design like this today and say boy that's pretty rudimentary and simple you

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got to give it full credit for longevity I mean it's hard for a trace that thick

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to spontane ously fail from you know Heating and Cooling Cycles also these

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really are two different models of switch they intended for them to feel

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different input comes from these rotary encoders here which I mean we gave a

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light cleaning to but that did not make any difference whatsoever because I mean

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look at this thing it's basically Immaculate inside so we're probably

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misinterpreting the signal which unfortunately is a much more difficult

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fix of course with this much inv in the project what were we going to do give up

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no so the Labs poured over the schematics and identified the two

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integrated circuits at the heart of the mouse as the k561 tm2 which when you

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track down a data sheet and then translate it turns out to be a flipflop

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which is basically one bit of memory a zero or a one and each of our two ic's

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contains two of these flip-flops along with the ability to clear or reset them

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and suddenly that reset pin that we couldn't figure out before becomes the

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star of the show as it turns out the flip-flops are telling us which

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direction or directions that the mouse

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last moved positive negative or stationary on each axis then all we have

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to do is reset the flip flops to their default State wait some tiny amount of

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time and then check them again to see what's happened rinse and repeat

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forever our Pico then can take that

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information and tell our cursor to move slightly in whatever direction we're

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meant to be moving now we're not sure

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how often it would have gone through these Cycles on a BK series but through

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trial and error we were able to push it to around 4.5 Kilz or around 4,500 times

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a second I mean that seems pretty solid

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right I should be able to Game On yeah 4500 times a

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second maybe oh

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oh hey I mean there is no question in my mind

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this mouse is working I'm not only able to play I'm able to enjoy playing the

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game flipping Crazy by the way did the shotgun take that guy out from here a

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little bit wow Mouse pointer speed yes

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let us increase wow that is still not great I

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mean I mean good job Labs team what I will say though is compared to the cable

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the ergonomics are far more bothersome my wrist is already acting up I've been

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using it for like 5 minutes this is atrocious it's like we had plastic

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molding technology but we didn't have the technology of what shape is an

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actual human hand and that's far from the only problem while it is usable it's

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really slow I am all over my desk pad here and these are both things that we

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could fix right like if we tweak the Pico to move farther right on each pole

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then yeah it could be a lot faster but that would make the jitteriness go up we

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could get the jitteriness to go away by making it not move as far so it's not

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skipping 10 pixels each time but uh then

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it would be even slower oh crap I'm going to die I have eight health I

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died I blame the equipment in conclusion then while the

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Martian is technically a gaming mouse in that I did play games on it meaning our

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title is not clickbait realistically

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it's more just a cool piece of retro technology that never made it to the

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west and an excuse to show off how the

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lab is going to help us continue to make better videos even if now this is a $350

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Mouse plus however many hundreds of dollars of Labs time all for something

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that is so much worse than my GPR wir and so much worse than the segue to our

00:14:31.120 --> 00:14:38.959
sponsor if you enjoyed this video maybe check out our full retro review Retro

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Retro Retro viiew whatever of the Razer booms slang which I would say arguably

00:14:41.240 --> 00:14:47.759
was the last truly high-end gaming ball

00:14:44.759 --> 00:14:47.759
Mouse