Mouse sensitivity?

sleve_mcdichael

Playing Starcraft through the RetroPie-Extra script. Works great -- mouse is quite jumpy. It plays through wine -- I don't know wine. Is there a way in wine and/or Linux to adjust the mouse sensitivity & slow it down a bit? I must be googling wrong because all my results just say "no you're wrong, wine doesn't have mouse acceleration." I didn't search for "acceleration", I just want to reduce the sensitivity.

windg

I find this info to disable mouse acceleration but i haven't test it:

To disable mouse acceleration completely:

1)Open /boot/cmdline.txt in a text editor
2)Add to the command line usbhid.mousepoll=0
3)Reboot

sleve_mcdichael

@windg that's...a little better? Maybe? Hard to tell, still pretty fast. Really I just want to slow the whole thing down. Any "acceleration" (I'm using that right, right? That means, like, that the mouse pointer onscreen moves more pixels-per-inch drug across my table when I move it fast, than when I move it slow, right?) that can actually stay, I'm not too concerned with that aspect...I just want the whole thing to go more slower all of the time.

mitu

@sleve_mcdichael Look into xset/xinput to control the mouse acceleration/sensitivity - see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_acceleration.

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu

2.2 Using xinput

This looks like probably what I need, but...

$ xinput list
-bash: xinput: command not found
$ sudo apt install xinput
[ ... ]
$ xinput list
Unable to connect to X server

I guess I need to be inside the X environment to make this work? Not sure where to go from here. How do I test and, ultimately, implement this? Do I need to have the full desktop and do it in a console window? For applying it, that link suggests putting the commands in ~/.xinitrc, but what if I only want it for some games, or different settings per game, will that be possible?

mitu

Aren't you already running starcraft via wine from the desktop ?

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu said in Mouse sensitivity?:

Aren't you already running starcraft via wine from the desktop ?

No, I'm launching it by runcommand with a helper script (adapted from the scripts at RetroPie-Extra):

starcraft = "XINIT:/opt/retropie/ports/starcraft/starcraftr.sh"

starcraftr.sh:

#!/bin/bash
xset -dpms s off s noblank
matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar no &
cd "/opt/retropie/ports/starcraft/data" && ./starcraft.sh

starcraft.sh:

#!/bin/bash
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. setarch linux32 -L wine libscr_sa_arm.exe.so

mitu

@sleve_mcdichael The 1st script starts a minimal desktop env from X11. You can add the xset/xinput commands in the 1st script, before starting Starcraft.

sleve_mcdichael

Huzzah! After a little bit of grep and quite some trial-and-error, I found:

$ xinit -- vt1 -keeptty

(Side note: while this works, it uses a small corner of the screen. How to make this full screen?)

With that, I was able to use xinput list and list-prop and get the device name and properties unique to my setup. This led me to:

$ xinput set-prop 'USB Optical Mouse' 'libinput Accel Speed' -0.25

This immediately slows the on-screen pointer by roughly 25% (acceptable values seem to range -1.0 to 1.0, and default is 0.0).

Alternatively:

$ xinput set-prop 6 275 -0.25

...also works, if I were confident the device number won't ever change. I don't know what happens if I reboot, or plug/unplug additional devices etc., though, so I stick with using the name.

Now, starcraftr.sh:

#!/bin/bash
xset -dpms s off s noblank
xinput --set-prop 'USB Optical Mouse' 'libinput Accel Speed' -0.25
matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar no &
cd "/opt/retropie/ports/starcraft/data" && ./starcraft.sh

(The trailing & used in the example was not necessary)

This worked, but still a little fast and so I dropped it down again to -0.5. Now that feels more like what I'm used to.

Now, let's say I am a user who can't or don't want to alter the root-owned starcraftr.sh in the install folder. Or, maybe I just don't want to lose my custom setting to a reinstall. So I copy it into config dir at /opt/retropie/configs/ports/starcraft/starcraftr-slowmouse.sh, make the edits there, and then edit emulators.cfg like:

default = "starcraft-slowmouse"
starcraft-slowmouse = "XINIT:/opt/retropie/configs/ports/starcraft/starcraftr-slowmouse.sh"