Trackball with 9 pin serial port not recognized by OS

Question

I need to support a trackball mouse (Make:- Cortron Inc) with a 9Pin serial port connector in my application (qt VS2008). This mouse is not getting recognized by my OS (Windows XP) (I dont see the cursor). I do not have a driver and I have not been able to find the device specification online. I tried to get the mouse inputs by writing the COM1 listener as decribed in link http://www.robbayer.com/files/serial-win.pdf. The code doesnt give any error but I donot see any values in the bytes I read. I have changes the baud rate and timeout parameters. The interesting part is that I have seen this mouse work inside another application (here too I dont see the cursor when this app is not running) in a different PC same OS.

I have attached another trackball mouse (Make:-A 4 Tech) with same 9pin serial port and this one works (shows me the mouse cursor, behaves like regular system mouse). Even here I have not installed any driver nor do I get the error message. The COM1 listener says "Invalid handle" and portmon.exe (Com port sniffer) tells "Portmon could not attach to Serial0 - the device may be in use". What could be the problem? Is a driver mandatory? I need to support the Cortron Inc trackball not the A4 Tech one.

Answer 1

I can detect the trackball now :). The issue was with the serial port settings which werent mentioned in the site. This mouse follows Mouse system Rs232 protocol. Once the correct parameters were passed the inputs started getting captured. For more protocol details you can look up to http://www.mousetrak.com/rs232mousespec.htm