We have an old Mac that I upgraded with a USB card sometime back. It has been running OS X and a USB mouse. Yesterday I gave away some old hardware, including our last ADB mouse. Today I booted the machine into OS 9.2 only to find that the USB mouse doesn't work. No problem, just boot back into OS X. Uhm, er, the startup control panel doesn't allow you to switch betweeen OS's using the keyboard.
Ok, I need to enable the accessibility control panel, which allows a keyboard to act like a mouse. Not installed. Reboot onto a OS 9 install CD, find control panel, open...you guessed it:
ACCESSIBILITY CONTROL PANEL CANNOT BE ACCESSED WITHOUT A MOUSE!
Change of tactics, let's get the USB driver. Managed to find and fire up a browser, get to the support site (Macally) and download the driver. The installer REQUIRES A MOUSE CLICK to accept the licensing bull.
Along the way I found a rats nest of secret keycodes, none of which work on this hardware/software/user. Hey, maybe we should have a Great American Mouse-out week, where all programmers spend a week using their own programs without a mouse. Or maybe half the week without a mouse, the other half without a keyboard.
I'm hardly an expert on such issues, but at the very least it seems that when a mouse isn't present the accessibility options should automatically kick in.
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Did you try this stupid long URL that would look better as an href?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106696&SaveKCWindowURL=http%3A%2F%2Fkbase.info.apple.com%2Fcgi-bin%2FWebObjects%2Fkbase.woa%2Fwa%2FSaveKCToHomePage&searchMode=Assisted&kbhost=kbase.info.apple.com&showButton=false&randomValue=100&showSurvey=false&sessionID=anonymous%7C161917559
Ug, that's a beauty.
I tried booting with X down (and x and ctrl-x and cntrl-X) but I didn't know the part about letting go once it restarted. I *think* it restarted.
So much easier today now that I have an ADB mouse!