Alessandro Levi Montalcini has announced the release of USB Overdrive for Mac OS X. This release has support for mouse and trackballs only.
Montalcini advises that there are several issues with the newest release including: The user interface needs to be polished, and the icon is ugly; the Joystick/Gamepad section is not yet enabled; this beta only works with mouse or trackball devices; AutoScroll is temporarily disabled (will be ready soon); Accelerated Scrolling is not yet functional (will be ready soon); Use Global Settings is not yet functional (will be ready soon); the “Auto Move” option is gone until I figure out if it’s doable in Mac OS X; and the user installation process should be improved.
Under OS 9, USB Overdrive lets Mac users of USB game controllers and other input devices program them in ways that their native drivers won’t let them, and to sometimes enable USB device support in games that don’t support Apple’s InputSprocket software.
Montalcini also gave some insight as to why USB Overdrive has been so long in coming. “Mac OS X is a truly great platform, and its driver architecture is very well designed. It was hard for me to work on the public beta and on version 10.0 because none of my machines was fast enough and because a lot of OS stuff was still missing or incomplete. This caused some delay in my work, but then came 10.1 and all my problems were solved.”