Acknowledgements

Yuri Chebatarov. Yuri saw my message on the Microsoft device driver developers' bulletin board and contacted me about sharing ideas; he wanted to write a mouse driver for the orb. What followed from there was several weeks of very strange correspondence; without question, Yuri knows more than me about device drivers, but due to the strange customs of the former Soviet Union (Yuri lives in Tomsk, Russia) he was unable to get an actual orb to practice from. We developed a sort of Sherlock-and-Mycroft relationship, where I would do much of the actual codeslinging and then send Yuri snapshots, which he would digest and comment on. While the amount of actual code contributed by Yuri may be low, he provided information that was absolutely critical; in particular, I may never have gotten the input loop working without his help. He has been invaluable in the process of developing this driver, and thanks to John Radoicic, will hopefully have an orb soon and will be much more active with version two (when his mouse support will hopefully see the light of day). The significance of an American military helicopter pilot corresponding with a Russian software developer to produce a device driver for a gaming toy has not escaped me; when I was a child, the Russians were the Great Enemy. It is truly a marvelous time to be alive.

John Radoicic. John gets credit for being the first person to have materially contributed to this project by providing a SpaceOrb and shipping to Yuri, above. Many thanks to John for his generous contribution. In addition, John was better able than me to sort out the puzzle of Half-life game configuration using the new driver.

Jay Crowe. For several years Jay has run the only surviving SpaceOrb community support website. This is not a trivial undertaking. For several years I have mooched happily from Jay's website; it is a pleasure to contribute back.

Ken Yee. I detest GUI programming, which is why I am entranced with Linux and why the hidsporb driver is natively controlled by a command-line program. It is also why I am guaranteed commercial failure unless I change my ways! Ken has already begun work on a GUI-oriented shell for the orbcontrol code which will eventually make configuring the orb a pleasure. Ken also did independent research to figure out what directions the axes should "point" in in order to comply with the HID standard. Many thanks to Ken.

James Carter. James finishes up the lot of my four original beta testers (starting with Jay and Ken and proceeding to include James and John). Good testers are notoriously hard to find, and these four did a great job of beating the thing up for several weeks to help ensure a trouble-free launch

John Grantham. With only a few days to go, I realized that I didn't have anything approaching an installation guide for the orb. Several folks volunteered, but John got to me first. The screenshots and much of the text in the "installation" section of this manual are due to his last-minute work.

Jo Carter. No relation to James, Jo is my wife of almost ten years (we married the day after my graduation from the Academy, and have bucked the remarkably high failure rate of USAFA June Week weddings). Despite all the pressure from family and associates to abandon thoughts of software and make military aviation my career, she has supported me in all my computing efforts, even to the point of negotiating deals to publish Flynn Sprint, my first (and to date only) game. Since I do most of my computer work at home, my time with her over the past few weeks has suffered a bit, but she has not begrudged it at all. I could not have married a finer woman. (Incidentally: I occasionally field questions about why my wife does not share my last name. Primarily, it is because I courted her as Jo Carter, and was so pleased that I certainly saw no reason for her to change anything after our marriage. Secondly--would you have wanted to adopt the name "Putz"?)

The SpaceOrb Community. When I published Flynn Sprint, I had a fairly active community of beta testers who provided constant feedback and encouragement. In all my other computer endeavors, I never had anything approaching that until now, and had forgotten how much of a motivator it can be. Nothing is more pleasant than knowing that I have helped to solve a problem, and that people appreciate the product. Without the community, this would never even have made it to beta. I owe you a great debt.