MiSTer FPGA Forum

The MiSTer wiki says that MiSTer supports up to 3 mouse buttons. I have a Logitech USB trackball that has 4 buttons. When I run the Input Tester core, there are 8 mouse buttons listed. I see all 4 of my buttons get registered when I press them. What is the state of the mouse of the MiSTer??

The Arkanoid arcade core recognizes my trackball and one button for Fire if I set Pad Control to Spinner, while it recognizes Start and Coin buttons on a separate PS4 controller. Ok, this requires two USB HID devices but it makes the game playable, so I can work with this.

The NES core does not recognize my mouse at all when trying to play NES Arkanoid. Button/key remap option is useless, because separate HID devices. Vaus button config, useless.

The SNES core recognizes my mouse when set up in the options, and expects me to use it for every single aspect of the game. Need joystick/pad for menu configs, so...useless.

This HID inconsistency among the same game (essentially) on the same platform to me is lunacy. Am I missing something?

In terms of retro gaming, a mouse is rarely the primary input device. Even in older PC days, a mouse was not always included. Keyboard or controller was the typical input. That's carrying over to the MiSTer as it's basically accepted you're going to have something other than a mouse for the vast majority of the games. You need to consider that each platform handled everything differently, as well. The arcade was one control panel so the everything was just "there" for someone to play. The NES had the standard controller, no mouse, and something like the Vaus controller was an exception to the normal NES experience. And the SNES was another similar platform that the controller was widely used. It had a mouse but it was a very basic two button mouse. As far as how it was, your experience makes sense. Each platform had a different way of playing "the same game" and you're feeling the differences.

Something to keep in mind is that MiSTer is a "platform" but it's made up of numerous devs. Each core can be done by a different person.We'll see some rallying around some things like SNAC or the newly implemented shadow masks but no core dev *has* to follow any set standard. That's also why MiSTer has as many systems and arcade cores as it does. It's a community effort. Double check documentation for any settings or see how things apply. I haven't looked into it myself but it's possible the Vaus settings for the NES core only applies to spinners, not a mouse. Some devs program for just spinners and some devs program in for mouse / trackball support. It might also be a thing where MiSTer's constant additions and changes have lead to a situation where an old core only supported mouse because that's all that might have been available in the code. Today, MiSTer supports so much that newer or more recently updated cores have changed over to the more accurate analogs of the original experience (spinner for spinner, mouse for mouse) but the older cores obviously haven't. Some of those arcade cores haven't been updated in a long time.

What's the VID:PID of your trackball? use lsusb before and after plugging it in from the terminal. Maybe it just needs to be added to the driver list in linux.