Problems with mouse or dosbox

[Tuomas]

Hiya. So I did eventually buy that mouse. But now I've got a problem. To be completely honest, I'm not sure if it's the mouse, or what, but when I tried playing for example The Settlers 1, the mouse moves around as if the game was running slow. It just jumps from one place to another, and is basically impossible to get to the place you want it. the game only updates the position when it's stopped.

I know it's a dos game, and dosbox has some real problems running it. Well, not big, but it claims that "PCM sound hardware not found". I don't really know what this means, but, I just doubleclick on the settlers.bat, and it runs ok on its own, though not the mouse. Sound hardware? I don't see why it should need any PCM if it works fine with sounds by just doubleclicking. And here's the thing, it works completely fine on my girlfriend's computer. I wouldn't mind dosbox, but the mouse cursor is out of my control.

Basically I tried to run every game of mine. Basically The Big Red Adventure works fine but has the same mouse problem and a couple of graphical errors. Legend of Kyrandia 1 & 2 work perfectly, and don't use Dosbox. Indiana Jones, last crusade needs the Dosbox, but works great, and then there's a bunch of different ones that go with different varioations. Of course, I'd be very happy with DosBox, or completely without it. I guess the latter isn't an option considering the age of these games, but DosBox seems pretty awful most of times.

You know, I should probably ask at the Dosbox forums, but I've learned, that I get much better answers much faster from here, so... I don't really know what to ask. I finally got a mouse, and it's no better than the tablet I used for 6 months, or maybe I just don't know what to do with the games. After all, i haven't really played anything for, what, 1,5 years now...

[GarageGothic]

Is it a USB mouse? Perhaps you could try getting a USB to PS/2 adapter?

It seemed to solve a different but similiar problem here

[EldKatt]

The first obvious question is: how does the mouse behave outside of DOSBox? If fine, I'd intuitively think it very odd if it were the mouse that's the problem... and vice versa.

[GarageGothic]

If it works fine in Windows, it's probably an incompability with the DOS mouse drivers used in DosBox. You could try disabling pre-loading of DosBox' mouse driver and load mouse.exe manually inside DosBox before running your game.

[Tuomas]

Yeah, works all right with windows, but now it seems to work all ok with DosBox, aside from the Settlers game... So basically, well, I dunno, the .bat file opens in itself, not via DosBox as I said, DosBox gives it an error if I try opening it that way... but the mouse doesn't work with the windows start either. It might with dosbox, but i'm really not very good with DosBox, back in the Dos times, I had an Amiga...

[GarageGothic]

You still didn't answer if it's a USB mouse, but if it's newly purchased  I would guess so. Try downloading one of the mouse drivers  from here, save it to your Settlers folder and add the name of the .exe file to the top of the Settlers .bat file.

If it's a serial or PS/2, try CuteMouse instead (just put ctmouse.exe in the game folder).

Edit: You did unplug your tablet while running the game, right?

[Tuomas]

yep, unplugged, and yeah, USB, my PS/2 thing blew up at some point, so that's why I used the tablet for all that time and now bought a USB one. I'll try that driver thing tomorrow morning, thanks

[ManicMatt]

Some games struggle to run smoothly even in DOSBOX, but have you set dosbox to skip some frames and all that malarky to get it running faster/smoother? In Toonstruck the mouse icon would flicker, but not had that in any other games.

I've had the mouse slow down just as you described, and messed with dosbox's settings to rectify it.

[Tuomas]

I would have, had it run on DosBox, but since it gives me an error, I haven't been playing it through DosBox...