Any way to have two mouse pointers for one system.

[elkinm]

Is there any way to have two mouse pointers at the same time on one system in windows.

Using two systems with the same thing is doable, but it may be easier on just one system.

Thanks

 

[mugs]

Uh... I'm gonna go with no on this one, but maybe someone will surprise me.

 

[jfall]

Why would you ever need it?

 

[WannaFly]

Ive never heard of such a thing - how would you differ between which device controls what?

 

[imported_BadKarma]

Originally posted by: jfall
Why would you ever need it?

If you play Warcraft 3 or any RTS, you could have 2 people controlling the units. It's cheating, but hey, it's kinda cool.

 

[elkinm]

I was thinking of maybe mapping one pointer to a USB mouse or mouse1 and the other for mouse2 and maybe color code the cursors to tell which one is which.

This is something for work were the more mice or hands or both the better.

I have never heard of such a thing, but I don't see why it can't be done.

 

[Concillian]

It would certainly give new meaning to the term "double-click"

 

[tinyabs]

If you can use your hands and legs to control the 4 mice, I'm sure Microsoft will make Windows do it.

Technically, Windows doesn't support contexts (ie MouseId) for mouse so you can't do that.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: BadKarma

Originally posted by: jfall
Why would you ever need it?

If you play Warcraft 3 or any RTS, you could have 2 people controlling the units. It's cheating, but hey, it's kinda cool.

oh man, it was so fun doing this in StarCraft, although it was supposed to be able to...only you weren't really sharing two cursors, it was just more of a co-op than an ally situation. They'd give you all 3 races and your buddy could do all the annoying micromanaging and mineral management and defend the base while you went off and killed some computers, as the only really effective way to attack is to manage your attacking units to make sure they aren't blindly charging into siege fire or turret traps - only if you're managing these attacking units you're completely ignoring your base - this is where the friend comes in. Great way to take on multiple computers, its too bad StarCraft would get flaky with the ammount of computer controlled teams to make it challenging.

 

[igowerf]

There's a sourceforge project that's trying to add multiple mouse support in Windows:
http://cpnmouse.sourceforge.net/

Here's a discussion about using multiple mouse cursors:
http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/archive/2004/02/21/77787.aspx

Basically, it doesn't make sense to have multiple mouse cursors in Windows because we use the single focus GUI design. What's the point of having multiple mouse cursors if you can only have one thing in focus as a time? When you select one window, the other one deselects so you can't drag both at once anyways.

Anyways, just to plug my own stuff, I wrote a program that uses multiple mice inputs to musically "play" pixels based on their brightness:
Auptic
Description

 

[EpsiIon]

Originally posted by: Concillian
It would certainly give new meaning to the term "double-click"

Ba dum TSSH!