I have seen several programs that support multipul mice (USB ofcourse); how is this done? Multipul drivers? Or is there some library of api that can do that for you?
Printable View
I have seen several programs that support multipul mice (USB ofcourse); how is this done? Multipul drivers? Or is there some library of api that can do that for you?
Windows has support for multiple mice and other pointing devices. Unfortunately they are all funneled into one pointer on the screen (such as in the case of my laptop's touchpad and external mouse). There are ways of polling for pointing devices. The method that I know of is to use DirectInput (a DirectX API). Look up DI8DEVCLASS_POINTER on MSDN because it is used in enumerating multiple devices.
As far as the graphics driver is concerned, there is only ever one mouse-pointer (cursor), so if you want multiple mice to control a pointer each, the non-main one(s) will have to be done entirely in software. This works OK for most things, but if you have overlays, it may cause "interesting" things to happen (overlays are used by some 3D Open GL drawing software, as well as video-players such as Windows Media player). This is because overlays are handled by hardware, and there's no trivial way to see what's in the overlay layer.
--
Mats
Thanks for the replys. But I found and decided to use Raw Input. Unfortunately it only works on XP and up.