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OS X Steelseries Sensei drivers

AHDuke99

AHDuke99

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 14, 2002
2,310
132
Charleston, SC
Kind of confused about the driver steelseries engine. On their website, it says it works with the Sensei and lists Mac on the engine download page, but when I try to open the software, it only wants a Diablo 3 mouse. On the Sensei page it says Engine coming for Mac in 2012. Is it just not out yet? Or am I doing it wrong?
 
Out of interest do you have the RAW or the original Sensei? My Sensei is in the mail so I dont have direct experience, but from what I can gather on the website, there is no direct mac software support yet (still planned for 2012). But considering you can program all the functions either directly on the mouse using the lcd screen, or using the steelseries engine on windows (and store it onto the mouse's own profiles), you should at least have some options for customising performance under mac right?
 
I have the original one.

I can go to Windows and change things but in terms of editing sensitivity and speed under Mac, it's a no go.

I just emailed Steelseries and they acted like it should work, which is odd, because it clearly does not.
 
I'll give it a go tomorrow when mine arrives and post back. I thought its be possible to get at least a semi working solution for Mac. Ah well
 
alvindarkness said:
I'll give it a go tomorrow when mine arrives and post back. I thought its be possible to get at least a semi working solution for Mac. Ah well
Click to expand...

They emailed me back and said that the Sensei was not supported yet but was in beta testing and would be very soon. I use Steermouse right now which allows me to change the sensitivity and speed, but it's not free so I hope the SS Engine is released soon.
 
AHDuke99 said:
Kind of confused about the driver steelseries engine. On their website, it says it works with the Sensei and lists Mac on the engine download page, but when I try to open the software, it only wants a Diablo 3 mouse. On the Sensei page it says Engine coming for Mac in 2012. Is it just not out yet? Or am I doing it wrong?
Click to expand...

I can confirm that there are no "full support" drivers. The D3 drivers work only for the D3 mouse. That's it. Earlier this year, I was real excited when I finally found a store locally (Bangkok, Thailand) that had them in stock. Even though I had to pay well above retail, I was happy to finally find it. I had researched it online and based on their website, it "appeared" to have full Mac support.

However, based on my emails with the company, there are no Mac drivers. They claim that drivers will be available in September 2012. While the mouse is recognized in MacOS and you can do basic adjustments through the LCD on the bottom, to take full advantage of the more sophisticated features, you'll need a PC and the Windows version of the drivers. I can confirm that it works also in XP and Virtual PC. Without third party USB drivers ($12-20 extra), there is only generic USB mouse support.

While I know Mac users are typically considered 2nd class citizens in the gaming community, I received an unusually generic and barely helpful response from them. They wanted to know where I found this "misleading advertisement" about Mac support. I pointed out the fact that it's flat out wrong in many places and ambiguously misleading in even more places on their own website for the product and the drivers. I received no response for a month. Then, they closed my support ticket as "resolved" and did not update their website :(

For reference, here is the email response from support:


-----
Hey Kjohn

I'm afraid that Sensei is not yet supported by the Mac version of SteelSeries Engine. If you saw this advertised somewhere, please let me know so that I may ensure there is no misleading information. It will be available September 2012.

You can make changes to your mouse without the software as well. Press and hold the CPI button for 3-5 seconds which will activate the menu on the LCD screen (on the bottom of the mouse itself).

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Regards,
Mike S
 
Not trying to troll, but I'm not surprised. I'm a huge fan of their hardware design. The windows driver isn't bad either... Mac software.....ehhhh.. Even if I had the D3 mouse, I'm not sure... and the service and support???
 
kjohn said:
Not trying to troll, but I'm not surprised. I'm a huge fan of their hardware design. The windows driver isn't bad either... Mac software.....ehhhh.. Even if I had the D3 mouse, I'm not sure... and the service and support???
Click to expand...

I love the mouse... I was just hoping they would, you know, follow through on their claim that they would update their software to support the Sensei... their flagship mouse, by Sept 2012 like they said they would do... oh well.
 
I have an original also... I programmed it under Bootcamp, and it works fine under OSX once all of the settings are saved to the mouse.

I'm not holding my breath for a Mac utility. I've been a Mac user too long to still believe software companies will make good on their promises. But maybe they'll surprise me...
 
I too have had this problem... so tired of waiting. I picked up the RAW glossy version, would love to be able to customize it's two buttons on the right.
 
NorCalLights said:
I have an original also... I programmed it under Bootcamp, and it works fine under OSX once all of the settings are saved to the mouse.

I'm not holding my breath for a Mac utility. I've been a Mac user too long to still believe software companies will make good on their promises. But maybe they'll surprise me...
Click to expand...

I wouldn't have expected anything but they told me the sensei would be supported on their drivers by September 2012 and it was currently in beta testing... right now it only supports their Diablo 3 mouse. THey did release version 2.0 recently with the same diablo support though... oh well.
 
I'm waiting for that driver as well. I simply can not understand why this is taking so long, regarding that the diablo 3 engine is available since May...
I'm really disappointed. Seems that the steelseries support is pretty bad. I mean they said it will be out in september. I bought that mouse back in April and the driver is still not available...
 
omfg.

I'm really happy I'm within my 14 day return window, because my Sensei is going right back to the computer store.

I'm sorry, but a 110MB download for a *mouse* is absurd. Out of curiosity I installed it on one of my laptops anyways, and it has to be one of the most bloated, slow, and totally irrelevant configuration utilities I have ever laid my eyes upon.

First- it's written in .Net and ported to Mac OS X via Mono (so it's not a Cocoa app). Second, the entire UI is apparently driven by a bog-slow internal HTML engine- that's right, the GUI is written in HTML/CSS/JS. Apparently this was done so the UI can be skinned, because everyone wants to skin their user interfaces?

It's big, it's slow, and it doesn't even react that well because none of the UI controls are native.

I don't even know what to say, other then that this is stupendously excessive and completely absurd. Especially when a utility written in Cocoa would weigh in at under a megabyte (let alone 110 megabytes) and would be able to do the same thing faster and cleaner (of course, without the stupid skinned UI that looks like ass).

Frankly, this company is going on my **** list along with Razer and MadCatz. When any of them figure out how to write proper utilities, wake me up and let me know. Until then, I guess I'm sticking with Logitech- they seem to be the only company who produce mice where all buttons will work under OS X without extravagant software downloads.

-SC
 
didn't work for me

I installed the last version which was released the jan 4th but it didn't work for me. It just crash when I try to open it with the mouse plugged and it starts with the mouse unplgged but then when I plug it nothing happens and the engine keeps asking for a supported device. anyone else with the same issue?:confused:
 
Hello
I recently bought the steelseries sensei raw edition and it works fine on mac without any software installed (usboverdrive, steermouse, etc) although i have an issue when gaming on the mac side i cant set the 4 side buttons to do specific operations, it says that both side buttons on the left side and right are middle mouse key 3. Has anyone encountered this problem?

thx in advance
 
jfredsilva said:
Thanks! Did you already try it?
Click to expand...

Sorry for my late response. I've been using it since about 3 weeks now and it works pretty well. However, I was not able to restore the profiles from the mouse once, after I reinstalled my Mac. The macros were gone.
I also had issues with the profiles I used under bootcamp. The macros were also gone.
But everything else is working fine. Profile switching by switching the application or game works perfectly, it switches immediately.
 
Last edited:
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