Trackball as Scrollwheel

[0rca]

Hi all,

newbie here with a very general question for starters. Would it be possible with ahk to change the output of a (Kensington) Trackball so that it simply scrolls up and down instead of moving the cursor? I don't want to make this optional, I would love to have one trackball for this one purpose only. So no buttons to press as modifier, no other functionality needed, just this one thing (ok, horizontal scrollling would be nice too, but I'm not even sure, where to use it. Sketchup maybe....)

I have been searching and reading a lot and found many scripts, where people programmed a button to enable scrolling. But the straightforward, always on scrolling function I can't find resp. am not sure, if that would be possible at all. I also know, that ahk can't address one specific device, but I am hoping that I can solve that issue (e.g. via EitherMouse) when I know the whole idea would work theoreticaly at all.

As a background; I'm suffering from RSI and found that the best solution I ever had was the Microsoft Office Keyboard with a scroll wheel for the left hand. And now I am looking for some similar solution with affordable hardware and the trackbal seems the next best thing to me.

Thanks in advance for any answers

[guest3456]

Are you saying you want to plug in two trackballs as mice? And you want one of the trackballs to scroll and the other to be a regular mouse? I don't know how to separate different mice on the system.

If you just have one mouse and want that to scroll, that should be possible

[evilC]

Your problem is that you need to block ONE of your mice from being seen by windows, and the only method that the OS provides for blocking mouse input is hooks, which cannot block just one mouse, only all mice.

There is currently only one solution that I am aware of that will work for you, and that is Interception.dll
It's C++, but there is an AHK wrapper for it.

Nefarius' ViGEm project should, at some point, be able to hide a specific mouse, but AFAIK it is not ready yet.

[0rca]

Intercepting sounds like the thing to do. All the solutions I have found use the mouse pointer with a modifier, bringing up all kinds of problems like resetting the pointer to the original position after scrolling etc.
So I was hoping there is a solution that intercepts the input produced by the movement of the trackball and tells windows "this is a mousewheel". Same as you can move the mouse and scroll at the same time I thought it might be possible to use the right mouse as it is and use the left trackball for scolling and panning continuously.
So I guess what I really would need is a driver, that does this...

But just theoretically -with just one mouse - could I remap the trackball movemnets to be interpretet as scoll wheel movements?

[evilC]

with only one mouse, if you used hooks to trap the mouse movement and then sent fake scroll signals, then yes.
But you would not be able to use any mouse whatsoever to operate the OS while it was active.
It looks as if Nefarius' solution may be ready a little quicker than I thought - he appears to be actively working on the part we need at the moment.. All his work is geared towards joysticks though, so I am unsure if the method that I have in mind will work with mice, we will have to see.
Here's a screenshot of the new UI he has made which will let us configure which applications can see which devices: