The other optical mouse that requires a special pad
came with early
Sun workstations. It looked a bit, well, holographic. It had a
bunch of dots in it that reflected different based on where the mouse
was.
Actually, it has lines of one colour running vertically and lines of
another colour running horizontally, against a shiny background. To my
eye, the vertical lines look blue and the horizontal lines grey; I
suspect there is a reflectance characteristic my eye is not capable of
picking up there, especially as one of the LEDs in the mouse is giving
off invisible light (again, to my eye).
The visibly-lit LED looks red to me, and (based on covering each LED in
turn and seeing which dimension's motion breaks) goes with the blue
lines (not surprisingly); the invisible-light LED goes with the
grey-appearing lines.
If you can find suitable inks, printing vertical and horizontal lines
on a shiny surface should do fine - but beware that such mouse pads
exist in at least two and I think three different resolutions; while a
mouse designed for a fine-resolution pad works fine with a coarser pad,
the converse is not true. If you want I can approximate the line
spacing of the mouse pads I have, with a ruler or tape measure and
some careful counting.
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