I have a couple friends that play PC games on old-school Trackman trackballs. The amount of griping when we play a game with something bound by default to the mousewheel is INCREDIBLE.
That’s like using a Dvorak keyboard and complaining that games default to WASD bindings. This is the exact reason why key remapping is a standard feature on PC games but not on consoles
The old Trackmans have very limited inputs relative to modern gaming mice. There are some trackballs with scroll wheels, but they have different ergonomics (you rotate the ball with your thumb rather than your index, middle, and ring fingers) that my buddies aren’t fond of.
Given that theirs is a very niche use case, I don’t think anybody’s gonna make a trackball to suit them that also has a scroll wheel, but I guess if somebody was motivated enough, there’s an opportunity for some sort of ESP-based open source hardware.
I’ve always been curious about this. Do they play FPS games by chance? If so, how’s their aim compared to a traditional mouse? I’ve always had this intuition that it would be easier to aim with a trackball, but I’ve never gotten one to see for myself.
I have a couple friends that play PC games on old-school Trackman trackballs. The amount of griping when we play a game with something bound by default to the mousewheel is INCREDIBLE.
That’s like using a Dvorak keyboard and complaining that games default to WASD bindings. This is the exact reason why key remapping is a standard feature on PC games but not on consoles
The old Trackmans have very limited inputs relative to modern gaming mice. There are some trackballs with scroll wheels, but they have different ergonomics (you rotate the ball with your thumb rather than your index, middle, and ring fingers) that my buddies aren’t fond of.
Given that theirs is a very niche use case, I don’t think anybody’s gonna make a trackball to suit them that also has a scroll wheel, but I guess if somebody was motivated enough, there’s an opportunity for some sort of ESP-based open source hardware.
I’ve always been curious about this. Do they play FPS games by chance? If so, how’s their aim compared to a traditional mouse? I’ve always had this intuition that it would be easier to aim with a trackball, but I’ve never gotten one to see for myself.