n50 Software

Software

Is there such a thing as justifiable losses in the world of driver development? We're willing to say no. Unfortunately many companies don't see it this way, or just don't get it. Our experience with the Nostromo n50 drivers and software, to borrow a dead phrase, turned out to be a box of chocolates. Sometimes you find yourself eating those nice caramels, other times we were nibbling into some foul chunk of maggot filled, coconut covered strawberry nougat.

Setup screen

Immediate Setup

Installation of the drivers was all too easy. After we had plugged in the device, all we had to do was insert the driver CD. The installation started automatically and proceeded smoothly enough, that is until I saw what it had done to my mouse drivers. My Logitech drivers were thoroughly jacked. It was rather hard to take this in stride; you would not believe how dependent I am on the Web Wheel in the Logitech drivers. Angered I was.

Using the software that came with the device was fairly easy. The controller works by mapping over the default controls from the game. If you've changed them to something else, all you have to do is key in whatever your new controls are in the program. Mapping simple things like movement and jumping are relatively easy. What was even more surprising was how easy it was to make macro functions like buy scripts in CounterStrike. All you had to do was key in the buy sequence and you were done. Even making a crouch-jump script took only a handful of tries. Of course all this legwork has been done on this scene, with most scripts being downloadable now, this just makes it really easy to make your own scripts. One really great function was the ability to record the macros, but the engineers at Belkin went one step further. The program would record what keys were depressed AND for how long. So instead of timing a combination of moves you could just press the keys and manually adjust the timing values. Truly genius.

Red Setup

Key options

Gooey

Overall, we'd have to say the software UI was done rather well. We didn't run into any problems using it at all, it's only when we got outside of the software did the problems start to creep up. We're not sure if we found all the problems or not, but what we did notice was rather startling. While browsing on the web, we found that we could no longer right click and open links in new windows. Add to that, we also couldn't use the find function anymore. Seething rage people, seething rage.

Throttle options

Events did take a turn for the better though. The uninstall process for the drivers was peachy keen. Once uninstalled, everything that was broken now began to work properly. Even the Logitech drivers started up with no problem. Back to computing bliss.