"Gaming mice" - crap?

[Baker]

I don't know why gaming mice catch so much flak.

I mean, some of them are pretty good. For example, this one is winning a game of Quake right now:

[golden_boy]

Yeah but that one isn't USB. It's also wireless. And it's too fat. Plus there's the need to feed it...

It works for both right- and lefthanders though...

The Razer is more useable with the latest kernel, but it still spams "blah blah status -84" into syslog several times a second. This isn't funny. It also makes Quake ambient sounds stutter. It's b0rked. I have an idea now why Razer needs their own drivers: to obscure all error messages... :-E

Meh. I have asked the official linux-usb-users mailinglist now. It's full of high-level nerds so I might be smarter soon.

:-D

[golden_boy]

Alan Stern, one of the kernel usb driver gurus, answered on linux-usb-users:

> What does the status -84 mean?

It means there was a low-level usb communication error. Maybe the cable connection isn't firm, or maybe the mouse just stops working every few seconds.

> Any hope to really fix this?

It's a hardware problem. Probably the easiest way to fix it is to replace the mouse.

At least when I use the most recent kernel.org kernel and turn off USB verbose debug, I don't have to look at the error messages anymore



By the way, I came across this thread over at besmella. It contains most relevant info about setting your mouse poll rate, mouse acceleration in X, and someone also posted a little program which lets you directly monitor your mouse polling rate. This way I found out that my USB port can only do 500 Hz. :-)

It's not true btw that 1,2,4,8 are the only valid numbers for usbhid.mousepoll; you can enter 16 or 32 and that will give you 62 or 31 Hz mouse polling rate. ^^