Anyone have a "Sound Mouse" they want to sell?

[SlagOMatic]

In the late 80s I had purchased a device called a "Sound Mouse" for my 800XL. It was essentially a sort of sound-activated paddle controller, more of a novelty than anything else. Almost literally before I took it out of the box, a friend (who was into programming the ST at the time) asked to borrow it to see if he could get the ST to work with it, so I let him. Months went by and I never got it back, and when I asked him about it he couldn't remember borrowing it from me and had no idea what I was talking about. (He was kind of an asshole.)

 

There are few references to it on the internet today and I've had a saved search on eBay for the past two years or so trying to find a replacement with no luck.

 

Does anyone happen to have one that they want to sell, or know where I might find one?

[Paul Westphal]

Man that’s a weird one

[SlagOMatic]

2 minutes ago, Paul Westphal said:

Man that’s a weird one

Yeah. It was actually a bit of serendipity. At the time, I was very interested in learning how to play the piano. When I saw this Sound Mouse I immediately envisioned writing a of training program, sort of a primitive version of Rocksmith. The idea was I'd set the device on the speaker of my (musical) keyboard, then run a program on the Atari that would read the value of the Sound Mouse as a musical note. The Atari would play a note and I'd have to match it, +1 point for success, -1 point for failure. Over time I'd come to associate the notes with the keys, thus helping me learn how to play.

 

I had written the barest framework of the program before my friend saw it and asked to borrow it. Since I still had a lot of coding to do before I was ready to use it I didn't see the harm. When he subsequently forgot its entire existence I got a little pissed off at him.