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Sanwa Supply MA-401MACML 【COMFORT MOUSE】 - Modification/Corrections

Posted by: finkmac on 2025-08-13 19:36:20

Recently, I encountered one of these Sanwa Supply 2-button ADB on an online marketplace.

I'd been looking for a nice 2-button ADB mouse for a while... so why not this one? It has a rather attractive look.

Yes, 2-button ADB mice do exist. The most common one is probably the NeXT ADB mouse:

This implements the "standard" ADB secondary mouse button. Classic MacOS usually ignores the 2nd button signals, you need a 3rd party utility like TheMouse or Kensington MouseWorks to map it to something.

Beware, some 2button ADB mice do silly things... Like hardwire the 2nd button to a ClickLock function.
Apparently the Macally 2 button ADB mice use a proprietary protocol which needs it's own driver. Why? I dunno. Macally Moment!

Anyways, it arrived without issue

I plugged it into my SuperMac S900 and tried it out. Seemed to work fine without the 2nd button addons.

Installed TheMouse2B and rebooted... and Immediately started running into problems:
The context menu would open, but I couldn't close it. Neither button seemed to work.

Annoying. I disabled TheMouse and installed Kensington MouseWorks...

...Which caused the main mouse button to register as clicked.
If a dialog appeared at boot, the OK button would appear as held down. If it did make it to the desktop, the menus would be held down.
Concerning. This was only happening with the Sanwa mouse plugged in...

So, it's time to do some online research.

It seems that @Dandu has the same mouse. He has tested it out and provided this information:

Je parle français un petit peu.. by which I mean I usually run things through translating tools.

Spoiler content hidden.

This tells us a few things:

The designer of this mouse is Brain Damaged. Why the hell would you sell a 2 button ADB mouse where both buttons are the primary mouse button? Even worse, Sanwa sold a single button version of this mouse!!! Why the hell did they make a 2button variant where both buttons are the 1st button? Are they stupid?
Something is screwy with the way they wired things up

Time to crack this silly thing open!

*You gotta peel the bottom sticker off. Use a plastic scraper or something idk. There's a single Phillips screw under the sticker

Inside, we find the ADB Mouse Controller IC

Conveniently, the datasheet is available online

Reading through the datasheet we find that the controller does support a 2nd (alternate) button, "ABTN".
It also has provision for a Drag Lock button which would act like a primary button held down.
Note that it specifies "For mouse operation connect this pin to V DD" by which it means "if you don't use it hook the pin to +5V"... this will be important later.

Flip the board upside down and we find this:

We can see two things:

Both buttons are wired together. Brilliant
The ABTN is not connected to anything at all.

The datasheet states:

The MTA41120 push-button inputs are defined to be

active when the input pin is in the low state. The

appropriate message data bit will be set equal to one

when a low is sampled at a switch input. When a switch

input is sampled in the high state the appropriate

message data bit will be set equal to zero.

So, if the ABTN pin is connected to nothing... it won't be pulled high.. the IC reads the ABTN pin as being low, and activates the 2nd button signal.

This mouse PCB is designed in a way that causes the mouse controller to continuously send "button 2 pressed" commands to the computer.

Without extra inits/cdevs it will work fine on a normal Mac, but if you install multi button support add-ons... they'll read the commands and make things unuseable.
This would likely make an ADB NeXT go nuts as well.

So to recap. This mouse is wired incorrectly for both single button and 2 button operation. Literally Defective By Design.

Time for surgery:

I made two incisions to separate the two buttons, patched the primary button to the +5v pullup/PBTN line.
Then I soldered the second button to a second +5V pullup (20K), and then jumpered that to the ABTN pin.

A bit messy. That's alright, it beeps out fine.

And sure enough... It works perfectly! No phantom presses, primary and secondary clicks work perfectly!

Cleaned up the solder job... And now we're done.

A perfectly working standard ADB 2-button mouse. Now I can open context menus with one hand! Excellent.

disclaimer: this is an artist's impression. the screenshot I took did not capture the context menu so I improvised.

To the Sanwa/Sanwa OEM designers. What's wrong with you? Why would you do this? I hope you stub your toe and crack the nail.

And if you have one of these silly things... Fix it!

Also if you have a 2button mouse where the 2nd button is hardcoded to drag lock.. You can probably fix that to work as a proper 2nd button.

Now I'm wondering if the single button Sanwa mice are also wired in this stupid way. Do you have one? Let me know in the comments below 👇

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Posted by: cheesestraws on 2025-08-14 03:42:54

This is a salutory reminder for nostalgists that old computer hardware is often in fact worse.

Posted by: croissantking on 2025-08-14 10:14:16

Nice write up and a satisfying outcome.

Posted by: sstaylor on 2025-08-15 03:04:14

This is a salutory reminder for nostalgists that old computer hardware is often in fact worse.

Yeah, but it's got wood grain!

Posted by: Dandu on 2025-08-15 12:40:59

Nice ! Il will try with mine

Posted by: sfiera on 2025-08-18 05:04:51

Now I'm wondering if the single button Sanwa mice are also wired in this stupid way. Do you have one? Let me know in the comments below 👇

I don’t have a single-button ADB Sanwa mouse 👆

But I do have a MA-402MAC. It seems like they figured out there was a problem, and decided to implement a fix.

Specifically, they wired /ABTN to a 33k pull-up (R9), and wired both mouse buttons to /PBTN. W…was that not the fix you expected?
(Mmm, cheese)

I can at least confirm that the buttons work as expected in the USB versions.

Posted by: cheesestraws on 2025-08-18 05:27:00

Specifically, they wired /ABTN to a 33k pull-up (R9), and wired both mouse buttons to /PBTN. W…was that not the fix you expected?

beautiful. flawless engineering and requirements analysis right there.

Posted by: finkmac on 2025-08-18 05:42:06

I don’t have a single-button ADB Sanwa mouse 👆

But I do have a MA-402MAC. It seems like they figured out there was a problem, and decided to implement a fix.

Specifically, they wired /ABTN to a 33k pull-up (R9), and wired both mouse buttons to /PBTN. W…was that not the fix you expected?
(Mmm, cheese)

I can at least confirm that the buttons work as expected in the USB versions.

Ah interesting.. Didn't realize they had another revision. Do you have a picture of the other side of the board? I'm curious what ADB controller it's using.

That fix seems half-decent.... Two primary buttons is still absurd, but at least there's no extraneous ADB signals 😆

Why not give it a wood grain paintjob? that will cover up the cheese.

Not surprised the USB ones work well... they'd need to make sure they worked on PCs after all!

Posted by: sfiera on 2025-08-18 06:35:46

Same one. Exact same markings:

Posted by: eharmon on 2025-08-18 16:56:17

"Any button the customer wants, as long as it's the primary" - San "Henry Ford" Wa

Posted by: lolo799 on 2026-02-06 04:45:52

Late reply, Sanwa Supply also sold a mouse with two working buttons, with a control panel for MacOS 7/8:

MA-401MACG3【コンフォートマウス(マットブラック)】使い易いコンパクトサイズ。ますます充実コンフォートマウス。 | サンワサプライ株式会社

MA-401MACG3【コンフォートマウス(マットブラック)】使い易いコンパクトサイズ。ますます充実コンフォートマウス。

www.sanwa.co.jp

Posted by: finkmac on 2026-02-06 05:29:17

Late reply, Sanwa Supply also sold a mouse with two working buttons, with a control panel for MacOS 7/8:

MA-401MACG3【コンフォートマウス(マットブラック)】使い易いコンパクトサイズ。ますます充実コンフォートマウス。 | サンワサプライ株式会社

MA-401MACG3【コンフォートマウス(マットブラック)】使い易いコンパクトサイズ。ますます充実コンフォートマウス。

www.sanwa.co.jp

this just makes the other two versions look dumber! They could have made them work properly, but they just didn't? for some reason?

unfortunately the control panel wasn't archived... probably lost now.

Posted by: lolo799 on 2026-02-06 07:23:16

This control panel is still available:

「Mouse Commander」(Ver1.1)のソフト（ドライバー）ダウンロード | サンワサプライ株式会社

サンワサプライのソフト（ドライバー）ダウンロードのページ。mc11.sit.hqx

www.sanwa.co.jp

Posted by: adespoton on 2026-02-06 11:15:15

See also our previous discussion: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/lindy-mouse.43834/page-2

Posted by: finkmac on 2026-02-06 12:03:54

See also our previous discussion: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/lindy-mouse.43834/page-2

interesting. skimming the thread it looks like the lindy mouse might be doing something in a similarly stupid way to the sanwa thing.

@reddrag0n have you cracked open your lindy mouse?

This control panel is still available:

「Mouse Commander」(Ver1.1)のソフト（ドライバー）ダウンロード | サンワサプライ株式会社

サンワサプライのソフト（ドライバー）ダウンロードのページ。mc11.sit.hqx

www.sanwa.co.jp

aha. thank you.
hey, you have one of these defective sanwas too.. you should mod it like I did 😀