But, as with any good story, there's a dark side.
I have no mouse.
This rules out a lot of the games that I wanted to play on the machine in the first place - Monkey Island, Return of the Phantom, SimCity 2000, Warcraft.... I've been bound to the torment of a keyboard-only existence, and it has fractured my very soul.
Imagine my glee, then, when today's mail arrived - and, with it, came a nice, shiny new serial port mouse - one I could use with my ancient machine.
I plugged the sucker in and fired up the drivers, only to be confronted with a mysterious error: COM port cannot found. Huh.
After some fiddling in the BIOS, I managed to get COM1 and COM2 sort of working... except the mouse drivers (all three that I tried) still refused to acknowledge that there was, in fact, a mouse plugged in.
Thus it came to be that my only course of action was to drop some money, and acquire a PCI board with some COM ports on it, just to make sure.
As it turns out, $50 later, the PCI board also doesn't improve the situation.
I did notice something intriguing while opening up the machine, however - there, nestled right up under the AT keyboard jack, was a PS2 mouse jack. I hadn't seen or been able to make use of that jack previously, for one simple reason: the case doesn't have a hole there.
Without a hole, it's kind of impossible to plug anything into the PS2 mouse jack. Impossible, unless, of course, the case was dispensed with and the motherboard laid bare on the sofa for examination.
After some minor surgery of the screw-removal type (and a few cable rearrangements) I got the port somewhat accessible, and popped in my sole functional PS2 mouse.
Instant success.
So now I have not only wasted time but also money on trying to get a serial mouse to work, when all this time I could have been using the PS2 port... if only the case had a hole.
That means that now it is time to make a hole, because damnit, I wanna play my games.
I am now brandishing a pair of tin snips threateningly at the case, and should hopefully be filling my new hole in short order.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
