Alessandro Levi Montalcini http://www.montalcini.com
C.so Re Umberto 10 mailto:alm@montalcini.com
10121 Torino
Italy
• Introduction
◊ The USB Overdrive is a universal USB driver that handles all USB mice, trackballs, joysticks and gamepads from any manufacturer and lets you configure them either globally or on an application-specific basis. It reads all kinds of wheels, buttons, switches and controls and supports scrolling, keyboard emulation, launching and complex macros as well as all the usual stuff like clicking, control-clicking and so forth. The USB Overdrive can easily handle several USB devices at once- I have two mice, one trackball, two joysticks and one gamepad connected to the same iMac, and each of them comes from a different manufacturer.
◊ Because each control in each device can be fully configured, the USB Overdrive lets you use any joystick or gamepad with any game, including the ones that don’t support Apple’s InputSprockets. You can map your joystick movements and buttons to the keyboard and mouse to make the game believe you’re playing on the keyboard, and you can do this mapping separately for each game so that it’s immediately available as soon as the game is launched.
◊ For games that already use InputSprockets, the USB Overdrive provides all the needed hooks to support the device-specific configuration panels provided by the manufacturer.
◊ The mouse settings allow you to speed up your daily tasks by assigning useful actions to all the extra buttons and wheels in your USB mouse. You’ll typically want to assign a control-click to the right button for easy contextual menu acces, and enable document scrolling if your mouse has a scrolling wheel.
◊ The Control Panel includes an active help feature that explains each command and option as you move the cursor around.
• Installation
◊ iMac users should first install Apple’s iMac Update 1.1. This update is available for free on Apple’s web site, and it fixes several USB-related issues that may cause problems with USB Overdrive.
◊ The USB Overdrive Installer installs the following files:
- USB Overdrive control panel in the Control Panels folder.
- USB Joystick Overdrive extension in the Extensions folder.
- USB Mouse Overdrive extension in the Extensions folder.
◊ To enable USB Overdrive’s universal, non-specific mouse and joystick drivers you’ll have to manually remove any device-specific mouse and joystick drivers from your Extensions folder. There are no such drivers in the Mac OS so you don’t have to worry about them if you never installed any USB driver yourself. However, you probably installed a specific driver for your mouse when you bought it. This typically includes one or more extensions whose name starts with “USB” and one or more control panels. Because these drivers only work with their own device, the Mac’s USB software thinks they are the best match for that specific device when it compares all the available drivers. Moving these drivers out of the Extensions folder allows the USB software to load USB Overdrive instead.
◊ You do not have to remove any device-specific InputSprocket extensions. These extensions won’t conflict with USB Overdrive, and they allow you to configure your device using Apple’s InputSprockets in games that support it.
• OEM licensing
◊ If you are a USB manufacturer or a game developer and you want to include a pre-registered version of USB Overdrive with your products, please contact me at <alm@montalcini.com>.
◊ The original, unmodified and unregistered USB Overdrive distribution package can be freely included with any USB device or Mac game, as long as the user is warned that USB Overdrive is a separate shareware product and requires a separate payment. The latest official package is always available at <http://www.montalcini.com/>.
◊ Registration codes should never be distributed or otherwise revealed.
