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		Question about Cyborg R.A.T. 5 gaming mouse


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Question about Cyborg R.A.T. 5 gaming mouse

Tue Jul 27, 2010 3:15 pm • #5558

ape

Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 19

I just purchased a R.A.T. 5 gaming mouse for a Windows 7 machine. Despite it's rather extreme looking design it's actually a very comfortable mouse.

http://www.cyborggaming.com/prod/rat5.htm

So I plugged it into my main OSX machine and the mouse seemed to work fine. CM see's all its buttons (a surprise, really). The DPI changing buttons actually adjust the mouse DPI as well.

Here's one super weird quirk though. I doubt it's related to CM at all, but thought it wouldn't hurt to ask this community about the quirk:

The mouse cursor moves just fine, but doesn't trigger hover states. For example, my Dock automatically hides. It unhides when you move the mouse cursor to the bottom edge of the screen. Except not with the R.A.T. 5. Menu items don't highlight, etc.

Weirder still: if there's an app window with scroll bar that's not in the foreground (like the textarea of this post) I can move the mouse cursor over the element and scroll using the scroll wheel on the R.A.T. 5 (just like any other mouse).

Can you even make a mouse that behaves like the R.A.T. 5 these days? It's baffling!

Re: Question about Cyborg R.A.T. 5 gaming mouse

Wed Jul 28, 2010 9:09 pm • #5564

Ken
Developer

Joined: 27 Mar 2006
Posts: 2122

ape wrote:

The mouse cursor moves just fine, but doesn't trigger hover states. For example, my Dock automatically hides. It unhides when you move the mouse cursor to the bottom edge of the screen. Except not with the R.A.T. 5. Menu items don't highlight, etc.

That is strange. The dock and menu state should be determined by the cursor position, not by the device that is moving the cursor. I don't have a guess as to why that is not working for the R.A.T. 5.
_________________
Ken
www.orderedbytes.com - www.controllermate.com
ControllerMate -- Programming controllers for Mac OS X since ... well ... recently.

Thu Jul 29, 2010 10:23 am • #5566

ape

Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 19

Is it technically possible, or even just easy, to build a mouse that behaves like this?

I ask because I have a hunch that Mad Catz has taken some sort of shortcut. At best the shortcut is at the firmware level, at the worst maybe it's at the hardware level.

Mad Catz support is silent on the subject. I'll most likely return the thing for that reason alone.

Thu Jul 29, 2010 9:15 pm • #5568

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

I have a RAT 7 on the way, you say it sees the buttons fine in ControllerMate - so that means they'll be programable right? The dock hover seems weird, I don't use that feature so I guess I'm lucky in that regard. Other than the dock are there any other things that don't work properly?

Edit: I have a Logitech MX1000 wireless mouse and although ControllerMate did work at one time with it, now that I look at it none of the buttons are highlighting on the controller panel (and the controller config I had setup does nothing anymore when turned on). Wonder what happened there. I bought the RAT 7 thinking that ControllerMate would be able to fill the gap for the extra buttons - have you checked in control panel to see if the other buttons can be used for stuff like Expose and Spaces?

Fri Jul 30, 2010 12:23 am • #5570

ape

Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 19

Hadron wrote:

I've done some more tinkering and it's actually worse than I thought.

The RAT5 is basically constantly pressing the left mouse button. This isn't causing immediately obvious issues in OSX because it's probably not sending any "left mouse button down" events - I'm guessing most apps look for that to determine when the mouse is down (for good reason).

Some apps, however, seem to get weird. I was writing some code in the Processing and Arduino IDE's today and couldn't figure out how I was randomly selecting text and why I couldn't unselect it until I realized the RAT5 was still plugged in. Both those IDEs are Java based. It's not surprising, given a Java app's platform agnostic nature, that it's acting up.

Unfortunately I'm going on 48+ hours with no response from Mad Catz, even after providing them links to some screen casts of the problem manifesting itself.

Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:08 am • #5573

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

It works fine in Windows though? That's weird, sounds like a malfunction - but with the newness and low availability of these mice I've not been able to talk with anyone else who's tried the RAT on a mac. I sent a message to Ben Kuchera who reviewed the mouse on Ars Technica to see if he tried it on a Mac.

Fri Jul 30, 2010 9:31 am • #5574

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

Got the response from Ben Kuchera: There is a slight issue that causes the cursor to flash sometimes, but it doesn't "click" down constantly. I'm using on my iMac now, and outside of that odd problem, it's working fine.

So maybe your unit is defective? This is a RAT 7 vs your RAT 5, so I'm not sure what other hardware differences there may be other than the external adjustable stuff.

Fri Jul 30, 2010 5:37 pm • #5577

ape

Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 19

Here's a screencast I sent to Mad Catz.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/100876/rat5_issue.mov

I'm using ScreenFlow to take the screencast. ScreenFlow has a feature that highlights mouse clicks with a red "radar blip". You see it when I'm using a Logitech mouse. When I switch the RAT 5 the radar blip turns into what it looks like when you hold the button down.

For those with RAT 5's (or 7's) - try this.

Open up a website in Safari. Find a page with a big textarea (such as the one you'd get if you were to start a new post here). With a normal mouse, when you move the mouse cursor from the textarea to the Desktop (just hovering) you'll see the cursor change appropriately.

With the RAT 5 you won't. If you click in the textarea the cursor will change to the "text editing" cursor. If you then move the mouse over the Desktop the cursor will remain in the "text editing" state.

If you were to take a normal mouse and click in the textarea, then move out of the text area (while the left button is still clicked) the cursor will behave exactly as the RAT 5 does.

Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:17 pm • #5578

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

Mine arrives on Aug 2nd. I'll update with results then for sure.

Sat Jul 31, 2010 11:35 am • #5580

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

I got my RAT 7 early and I have no problems with the mouse. Hover states work fine, DPI changes work, scrolling and so forth. The only minor issue I can see is that when you pick up the mouse to move it the laser seems to turn off quite quickly so there is a minor delay sometimes (maybe 10th of a second) before the mouse moves again.

As for ControllerMate... It shows up in the list of controllers with a C on it, properly identified. Yet, no buttons light up when pressed. Ken do you have any thoughts on this? Is there anything I can do to help diagnose the issue (maybe via CM device scanner)? I do not have any mouse drivers installed (no USB Overdrive or anything).

In System Preferences I've been able to assign the middle mouse and the two thumb buttons to various actions with no problem (buttons 3, 4 and 5). The 'Precision Aim' and 'Mode' buttons do not appear to be mapped to a generic mouse button. I'm also not sure how to check the thumb scroller. ControllerMate shows 13 buttons, 1 'Button Group' button, X-axis, Y-axis and a wheel.

EDIT: I installed USB overdrive to see what it can see and the DPI up/down are buttons 12 and 13. The "Mode" button is button 10 then button 11 (press it once it acts like a press of button 10 and lights up, press it again and it acts like button 11 and turns off the light). The "Precision Aim" button is button 8. The thumb "wheel" really isn't a wheel, roll it one way and its button 6 and roll it the other and its button 7.

EDIT 2: Ape, I got it to behave like you were experiencing. No hover states etc.. It was just after having USB Overdrive installed and fiddling with that when I noticed it. Uninstalling USB Overdrive and rebooting fixed the problem. I'll update if I can get it to happen again without USB Overdrive.

Sun Aug 01, 2010 9:27 am • #5582

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

I ran the CM Device Scanner with the mouse as the only USB device connected to my MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Core2Duo, 3GB RAM, OSX 10.6.4). Here is the output:

http://www.binarydiversion.com/temp/cyborg_rat7

Mon Aug 02, 2010 1:23 am • #5584

Ken
Developer

Joined: 27 Mar 2006
Posts: 2122

Hadron wrote:

Ken do you have any thoughts on this? Is there anything I can do to help diagnose the issue (maybe via CM device scanner)? I do not have any mouse drivers installed (no USB Overdrive or anything).

It would be helpful to select the Utilities > Driver Summary option in ControllerMate and save the output to a file. If you send me that file, I will take a look to see just what drivers are involved.
_________________
Ken
www.orderedbytes.com - www.controllermate.com
ControllerMate -- Programming controllers for Mac OS X since ... well ... recently.

Mon Aug 02, 2010 8:53 am • #5587

Hadron

Joined: 19 Mar 2010
Posts: 9

Ape, when submitting my Driver Summary to Ken I noticed that I had USBOverdrive in the list of drivers (even though I thought I had uninstalled it), knowing that ControllerMate can't work with a device handled by other drivers I removed the .kext file. Now I am experiencing the problems you describe with hovering.

I think what happened in my earlier test with USBOverdrive was that I had two versions installed without knowing. Thats why ControllerMate would not light-up buttons in the very beginning and still didn't after I had uninstalled the version I had just downloaded and installed (I forgot I had tried it out a while back for a different mouse). So good news is that at this point is if you have USBOverdrive installed the mouse works normal. But, I'd personally prefer ControllerMate to handle the mouse if we can make the hover states and all that work normal.

Fri Aug 06, 2010 9:01 am • #5597

ape

Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 19

Looks like they've acknowledged the problem and are working on a fix:

http://cyborggaming.com/blog/post/2010/06/14/The-best-gaming-mouse-ever.aspx#id_b94cf390-001e-4fcf-bc9d-0c0ef3901190

Fri Aug 06, 2010 3:19 pm • #5598

nehalem

Joined: 06 Aug 2010
Posts: 1

Really interesting. I've been temped to pick up a R.A.T. 5, but my main computer is a Mac so I was worried about the compatibility issues. As it seems evident, as long as I use USB OverDrive I should be able to use the mouse properly? Or at least it will function to a usable degree without major issues? (such as the hovering... that's just plain weird).


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