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by 2OEH8eoCRo0 1257 days ago
I was worried that would be detectable so I programmed the onboard memory of my Logitech mouse to jiggle itself.
3 comments

You can also put your mouse on a rough surface like I do. Optical mice are natural-born jigglers (my "stuff HN says" candidate).
Beautiful! Any tips on where to start learning to hack mice? I have a few where I'd love to tune the debounce algorithm (switch wear).
It's way easier than it sounds. Logitech provides a tool that lets you program their gaming mouses. They use Lua. I don't know Lua but there were plenty of guides for different gaming macros like recoil compensation and the Logitech documentation was decent enough.
Oh. I was thinking you were rewriting the firmware against the manufacturer's wishes.

I am not interested in installing bloatware drivers. Embedded IDEs OTOH...

Got one of these recently, they run qmk so easy to modify if that’s your thing: https://ploopy.co/
Is the program uploaded to the mouse, so does it still work if you plug it into a different computer that lacks the software?
Yes.
> macros like recoil compensation

Isn't this cheating?

It 100% is.

The problem is that preventing it is difficult to impossible.

You can't calculate recoil server-side because the latency would make it nigh unplayable. But once it's done client-side, it's cheatable.

This is making me feel old. Totally agree it is difficult, but not impossible.

Logitech is the problem here for even allowing this in the first place. No CRC checks for mouse firmware or anything? It screams poor implementation. I will not be surprised if anti-cheat software starts banning people or companies like Logitech.

Kind of sad to see the number of threads and communities online encouraging this. The point of games is to have fun, when you cheat all that goes out the door.

There are multiple mice vendors that allow this. And you can’t ban them because the cheater focused ones will just set their device ID to match some common device.
> No CRC checks for mouse firmware or anything?

It's client-side. Spoofing the CRC checks would be almost trivial.

The last thing I want is to have to buy a "certified/trusted" mouse to play a game.
Yes. I don't do it. But those examples were helpful since I don't know Lua.
Putting my glasses on my laptop trackpad does the trick, too. I guess the metal confuses the trackpad sensor.