Inside a vintage PC gameport analogue trackball.

This is a real oddity. I got it from a surplus stock seller a very long time ago. I was hoping it might work with my PCB software, but the software was designed for mouse style input and this unit used a different port and control system.
The classic PC gameport was designed to accommodate two joysticks with analogue position sensors and buttons. This trackball uses potentiometers for the ball position sensing.
The Marconi "Markus" trackball probably used phase quadrature like a normal mouse.
The Boardmaker 1 software was an entry level version of a professional suite. The £100 it cost was a lot back when I bought it somewhere in the 90's. It ran in DOS and I used it to design and hand etch a lot of prototypes and latterly to design the first PCBs I had manufactured. (Fairground lighting controllers.)
It was a very basic package with none of the integration and features of modern PCB software.
The reason I contacted Tsien about the software was due to a scaling bug in the Gerber output. Their response was dismissive, hence why I didn't proceed further with their software.
There are lots of better options for hobbyists and small manufacturers these days.
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