That cannot be argued in this case. The author explicitly states that he made an interceptor that sits between the PC and a regular mouse, so the interceptor is the one running the game.
> [..] detached the USB connection from the inside of a cheap HP mouse and fed it into the XIAO's USB port (this goes to the computer). I then wire up the aux USB connection using the XIAO's power/GPIO pins, which goes back to the original mouse's PCB. This creates a USB interceptor that can be programmed to do whatever!
It would be like saying you're running Megaman from your SNES's firmware, which even if it has a bit of truth, most technical people would object to.
If I switch back to a wired mouse, does that mean that all my games are running from my mouse firmware? What about if I tape a trackball to the top of my case?
I'm guessing there are non-zero number of people(not including myself) who hoped it is about a secretly reprogrammable mouse sensor.
Many cheap mouse sensors these days are ultra integrated to the point they often even lack USB pullup resistors. If they could be reprogrammed to, say, add a pixel dump command that very few of them implement, that would be very interesting.
This is about as "true" as fully replacing a Honda Civic's engine with something that has 10x the horsepower, and then advertising that you managed to get 10x the horsepower out of the Civic using the Civic's engine.
Your argument is more one of philosophy / law / BS than something anyone would take as true.
This doesn't even remotely address anything anyone has said regarding your claim about playing a game with the "mouse's firmware". At least you're now aware of how ridiculous it sounds, but clearly you don't care so long as you believe you could win this in some imaginary court case.
Well yeah, GP's argument applies here too: whatever engine you insert into your Honda Civic will be the Civic's engine, so the statement would be correct - as long as you specify that it's the Civic's engine and not the Civic engine (as in the original one).
To be less academic: I don't think there is a mouse in this world where you can actually modify the firmware, because using flash memory for something this dirt cheap and with a functionality that hasn't changed for decades is out of the question, so this is probably the only way to do it...
Looking at the comments here, I think there is a bit of a rift between how people think here and how the person who made this thinks. I can totally see how both viewpoints make sense. And even if you can't, it isn't that far-fetched to imagine a mouse that has a RP2040 in it from factory. (Power consumption wouldn't be stellar, but old optical mice used more.) I'd bet there is one somewhere!
