Supported devices
The USB Overdrive works with any compliant input device so there’s really no way to list them all. In general, the USB Overdrive should work with the following kinds of devices:
- Mouse, Trackball, Trackpad and other pointing devices
- Gamepad, Joystick, Racing Wheel and other gaming devices
- External keyboards (built-in MacBook keyboards are not supported)
- Many multimedia controllers
- Many generic devices with compliant buttons and controls
Apple Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard
Apple’s built-in drivers use undocumented private APIs to forward multitouch gestures to the OS. I’ve been talking to Apple for a long time about this, but it looks like multitouch event generation is not going to be available to 3rd parties anytime soon. Since multitouch gestures are more important than any other additional setting, the USB Overdrive is now leaving all Apple devices alone and no longer tries to handle them in any way.
Partially supported devices
Some Logitech and Razer mice hide some of their buttons and cannot be fully handled without intimate knowledge of their vendor-specific behavior, which is not usually disclosed to third parties. I don’t like to spend days on a single device to reverse-engineer it and add specific workarounds for its non-compliant controls, but I’ve done it in the past for popular devices and I’ll do it again in the future as a service to USB Overdrive users. If your device is not fully supported please let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
Devices that can be enabled
The Logitech force feedback gaming devices are handled by a specific kernel extension that ships with macOS and has a higher priority than the Overdrive. If you do not care about the actual force feedback feature (which is hardly supported anywhere) you can manually disable the LogitechForceFeedback.kext extension to let the Overdrive handle your device. Doing so requires some UNIX shell commands so I won’t go into detail here, let me know if you need assistance on it.
Unsupported devices
The USB Overdrive only talks to input devices. It does not support modems, serial adapters, network adapters, wireless adapters, scanners, printers, webcams, speakers, microphones, audio devices, hard disks, cd/dvd burners, etc.
Note to manufacturers and vendors
If you make or sell a USB or Bluetooth input device and want to make sure the USB Overdrive works well with it, please send me a hardware sample. I can’t test devices that I do not have. Please understand that I may not be able to support specific devices, but I’ll definitely look at them and see what I can do.