Microsoft changing stance on Multiple Mice?

[2600]

Stumbled upon this today and thought it was interesting for those who have followed the view of multiple mice in Windows throughout the years.

http://imaginecup.com/multipoint/default.aspx

Not too much in the SDK, but they mention there will be monthly updates.  I wonder if they will add it or something similar to XNA, maybe it's there I haven't checked.

[AlexKidd]

Interesting

[u_rebelscum]

Sorry for the skepticism, but MS has "promised" multiple mouse support and them removed it a few times.  And there was a SDK by a university that did the same as this new one.

Quick history:
MS DOS could do multiple mice with correct drivers and supported software.  Then came win95 that the drivers didn't work in, "removing" the multiple mice support.
When directX and directInput came out, some places in the documentation mentioned supporting multiple mice, but it didn't.  Later documentation mentioned you couldn't support multiple mice.  Then came directX 7.0 (and later) that did support separate inputs from multiple mice in win98 (& later winME, but not win2000) as long as the mice were USB mice.  There was a compsci project that supplied a SDK that "simplified" directInput 8.0 and supplied multiple pointers.  MameAnalog+ gave multiple mice (starting with directInput 8.0 but switched to 7.0 later), and when official mame changed the development tools to directX 7.0 it got very basic multiple mice support with zero code changes.  However, with winXP the directInput multiple mice support was intentionally "not added" (aka removed) for "security reasons".  So what does MS do?  Come up with "RawInput", which supplies multiple mouse support to winXP but not in win2000, and crashes in win9x.  (Official Mame now uses RawInput in winXP when it detects multiiple mice, and directInput in win9x & when there's only one mouse.)  I don't now about RawInput and Vista.  Now there's another way?

Anyway AFAICT, the only thing that this SDK supplies that RawInput doesn't is drawing the cursors for you.  I know it's beta, but ATM the stuff it does not are: support for non-Microsoft mice, support for non-USB mice, and support for coding outside of .NET 3.0.

That said, I'd love to see true, full multiple mouse support (eg: multiple cursors on the desktop) in windows, just to promote multiple mice thinking to more people, and expand past the current prevalent 2D mouse UI.  But unless this multipoint SDK gets really extented beyond what it currently does, I don't think it will do the trick; I'm hoping it a good push forward though.

[steveh]

I dont know if you guys have seen it.  but ive seen some videos of these smart display screens (probably wrong name)  where it was all touch screen and it could have as many "mouse" (touch points) as you wanted

they were using their hands, and easly had 10 different touch points.  All i remember is he was playing warcraft 3.

[Howard_Casto]

I dont know if you guys have seen it.  but ive seen some videos of these smart display screens (probably wrong name)  where it was all touch screen and it could have as many "mouse" (touch points) as you wanted

they were using their hands, and easly had 10 different touch points.  All i remember is he was playing warcraft 3.

These devices used to be quite rare, but now that they are going into mass-production (one is due out around 2010) this will be the thing that forces m$ to address the multiple mouse issue. 

I can totally understand why multiple mice support was so neglected... I mean aside from the wierd stuff we do who would need more than one independant mouse?