Mouse Pong: play a game from mouse's firmware with persistence of vision cursor | Hacker News Reader

Mouse Pong: play a game from mouse's firmware with persistence of vision cursor

github.com

173 pointsgvy-dvpont26 comments

The ideas people come up with never cease to amaze me...

Seriously. I'm genuinely curious what the thought process was that led to this idea.

Presumably bouncing the pointer between window borders in Zoom meetings. Maybe ADHD as well ;)

"Okay, I think they will be busy discussing whether to switch from Fibonacci numbers to t-shirt sizes for the next hour or three. What could I do..."

:( It doesn't run on the actual mouse's firmware, it has an extra RP2040 inserted between the mouse board and the computer.

Still nifty though.

it would be kind of neat to port this for an existing open-source mouse like [1] or [2].

1: https://ploopy.co/mouse/ 2: https://github.com/biomurph/Mouse

Even pedantically and by definition, it could be argued that it runs in the mouse's firmware.

It is quite often that "firmware" refers to a set of programs stored in the ROM of an embedded device, not just the one for a key functionality.

That cannot be argued in this case. The author explicitly states that he made an interceptor that sits between the PC and a regular mouse, so the interceptor is the one running the game.

> [..] detached the USB connection from the inside of a cheap HP mouse and fed it into the XIAO's USB port (this goes to the computer). I then wire up the aux USB connection using the XIAO's power/GPIO pins, which goes back to the original mouse's PCB. This creates a USB interceptor that can be programmed to do whatever!

It would be like saying you're running Megaman from your SNES's firmware, which even if it has a bit of truth, most technical people would object to.

If I switch back to a wired mouse, does that mean that all my games are running from my mouse firmware? What about if I tape a trackball to the top of my case?

It could be, if it ran in something that you got when buying the stock mouse.

It does not?

The RP2040 is running firmware. It is inside the mouse. It's now the mouse's firmware!

I get your point but I'm confident that if I had to lawyer up I would win this one :P

I'm guessing there are non-zero number of people(not including myself) who hoped it is about a secretly reprogrammable mouse sensor.

Many cheap mouse sensors these days are ultra integrated to the point they often even lack USB pullup resistors. If they could be reprogrammed to, say, add a pixel dump command that very few of them implement, that would be very interesting.

This is about as "true" as fully replacing a Honda Civic's engine with something that has 10x the horsepower, and then advertising that you managed to get 10x the horsepower out of the Civic using the Civic's engine.

Your argument is more one of philosophy / law / BS than something anyone would take as true.

And I think more importantly (I'm not going to engage with this branch of conversation beyond this)

Does the person buying a Civic capable of running 10X care? No. It's a 10X Civic. They've already crashed.

This doesn't even remotely address anything anyone has said regarding your claim about playing a game with the "mouse's firmware". At least you're now aware of how ridiculous it sounds, but clearly you don't care so long as you believe you could win this in some imaginary court case.

Well yeah, GP's argument applies here too: whatever engine you insert into your Honda Civic will be the Civic's engine, so the statement would be correct - as long as you specify that it's the Civic's engine and not the Civic engine (as in the original one).

To be less academic: I don't think there is a mouse in this world where you can actually modify the firmware, because using flash memory for something this dirt cheap and with a functionality that hasn't changed for decades is out of the question, so this is probably the only way to do it...

Pretty sure that the multi-modal wireless mice (think Logitech MX Master) have a firmware for the mouse and a firmware for the receiver.

(how I know: I managed to softbrick one - and reflash to working condition.)

Feel free to. I can't afford lawyers so you win.

This is a great hack. Very nice!

Great idea, and it is nice to see it on video!

The advertising about it is bad tho, it doesn't suggest that you have a specially crafted mouse for it, it suggests otherwise.

Looking at the comments here, I think there is a bit of a rift between how people think here and how the person who made this thinks. I can totally see how both viewpoints make sense. And even if you can't, it isn't that far-fetched to imagine a mouse that has a RP2040 in it from factory. (Power consumption wouldn't be stellar, but old optical mice used more.) I'd bet there is one somewhere!

Gives that lovely simple analog vibe of the 70s vector graphics from the Cinematronics games era.

Neat, you could pair this with a paint program and display vector graphics.

Ok cool but but now we need the obvious next step...

Can it run and render Doom?

Brilliant!

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