splitted USB-cable

[teal]

Hi there

I don't know if this topic ever came up, or if it's sensless to ask, but me and my collegue are now some time studying if it's possible. We want to create a homemade splitted USB-cable. Meaning: 1 mouse for 2 pc's; owning at your favourite FPS :-)

anyway, i think you get the idea.

After some pleasent hours with our soldering iron (that was fun), we've got our cable. Done some testing. but it won't work. Only 1 of our PC's would recognize the mouse.

After some recon in the allmighty net (jupp it's not just for porn) i found this page: http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=242. The guy had the same problem. It's something about: WHoever sucks the electricity out of the cable get's the mouse.

Our next plan is to invert an usb-hub with "cross-over"-cables and we hope that this will work (altough i think it won't).

Now i ask, has someone tipps, a page or can the allmighty and genius wess help me :-)

thx for helping

[sneaky_rupert]

It almost sounds like you are going to have to employ a separate microprocessor to handle the signals coming in fromt he two computers.

[teal]

Yeah, that's what i thought too. That's one of the reasons we want to try it with a reversed USB-Hub. But perhaps, there's another way to do so.

[Darren Kitchen]

Lets take a few steps back and explain to us what your goal is, because splitting a USB cable may not be the best solution. Yoy say you want a mouse on two PCs for gaming. Can you elaborate?

[teal]

well that's about it with the explaining: one mouse for 2 pc's :-)

We've got the idea from a guy who played World of Warcraft with 5 characters at the same time. He didn't tell what specific Hardware he was using, but it was some dude who had a lot of money (as he said himself, dont' know if it's actually true :-) but considering you have to pay 5x an Account this could actually be true), so i'm guessing he had some fancy stuff. Our idea is something similar but we're just interested in the howto, less in the use-to. and for little money of course.

So basically the idea is that we got 1 mouse and 2 pc's. We want that we can use the one mouse on both pc's simultaniously. Meaning: Both Mousecursors are at the same position, at every time.

First we thought, we could use a wireless mouse with two receivers. But because we didn't have such mices (and we didn't want to buy those) we didn't try it. I think, that wouldn't have worked either.

So we decided to try it with an usb mouse. the idea was simpel. we cut the cable in half (okay not directly in half, but i think you get the idea), and soldered 2 new cables at each of the little ones (GND,9V,Data-in and Data-out). At each end, we put everything in 2 male thingies.

[moonlit]

(GND,9V,Data-in and Data-out)

USB's only 5v, but I'm just being picky ;)

At first I thought you meant just controlling 2 PCs with 1 mouse... Youcould use Synergy for something like that but this won't work if you need it to move the mouse on both machines simultanously...

However, it's quite simple (providing the PCs are networked) to make a small app that records mouse activity on 1 PC and transmits it to the other for it to copy what you're doing on the first. I can't code outside of Visual Basic but I can think of a way it'd be possible in VB, you could track the mouse cursor and WinSock it over to the second machine and have a receiver app to play back the transmitted mouse movements/clicks. Sort of like a crude headless VNC-ish-type-thing.

You would have to mess with Windows APIs though I think, I have a feeling VB can't natively track the mouse position outside of it's window or move the mouse around the screen. Not the most elegant solution but totally possible and it would accomplish what you want, I'm sure there are many better alternatives though.

Edit: Note: This would be much easier if both machines are running at the same resolution, it'd be much harder if they're not... also you'll need both screens to display the same thing otherwise what you click on one screen might be completely different on the other.

[teal]

9V or 5V, does it really matter :-)

Synergy was my first thought too, but you only got 1 mouse for 1 pc. That's not really what we wanted.

Yeah, the thing with mouse-cursor emulation over network would be another way of doing it. in linux i created once an app that could move the mousecursor (with a scripting language). but i'm no good with windows (what's that anyway? some sort of dish? can i eat it? is it good?)

But I take the idea under consideration. It would be nicer though if it could be possible with a cable and without software, so that i can take it to another person pc and use it, without installing any software. and it would be plattform independent.

[VaKo]

There is something for OSX and Vista that allows you to use 2 mice on the same PC at the same time.

http://www.dualosx.com/dualosx_en.htm