I'm running dosbox .63 in Suse 9.3 and when I move the mouse is a DOS game (I've tried two different ones) the pointer moves down and to the right regardless of which direction I move the mouse. None of the options pertaining to mouse settings in dosbox make any difference. I've searched the dosbox forums, and one other person reported the same problem with Fedora core 3 running dosbox .63, but no one had a solution so I thought I would try here. Anyone else having this problem? I've used this version of dosbox successfully with older versions of Suse, so I'm wondering if the problem is that 9.3 uses Xorg as opposed to Xfree86, but I don't know enough about X to know where to look or what to try. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm going through serious MOO2 withdrawal.

try finding mouse.com somewhere and run it before you run your game.exe

Good idea, but unfortunately for me it didn't work. If I run mouse.com after dosbox is started it says "Another Mouse driver already installed". If I run it as a command line option to dosbox, ie dosbox -c $path/mouse.com; then the mouse still behaves the same way as before. I'll have to see if there is a way to not use the default mouse driver when runing dosbox so that I can try loading different ones to see if any correct the problem. At least it gives me some things to try.

Don't allow DOSBox to grab the mouse before the game starts. Leave the mouse cursor on your desktop, use the keyboard to start the DOSBox game, then click the mouse to allow the game to grab it.

That is what I have been doing. The cursor behaves properly in the dosbox window until the game gets a hold of it, then it always moves down & to the left. It doesn't matter which game it is. I haven't tried other DOS programs that use a mouse, I don't normally use any; but I'll try and find something else to test it with.

You're saying the mouse cursor is in the dosbox window (working) before the game starts. Try leaving it out of the dosbox window until after the game is started, then click on the game to let the game grab the mouse.

Another way is to use a seperate dosbox.conf file to autostart the game. Make a copy of the one you have and call it something like <game>.conf. at the end in the Autoexec section, put the commands to start the game.

If I start dosbox, and don't have it grab the mouse, the cursor moves properly. However, this is just the cursor movement in X windows. Once any program in dosbox has control of the mouse it always moves down and to the right. It doesn't matter what the program is, or when I have it grab the mouse. The mouse driver in dosbox must not be communicating properly with X-windows. I suppose I could configure my account to not start X upon login and see if that makes a difference. This has all worked fine in the past, before I upgraded to SUSE 9.3, so I'm pretty sure it is not a problem with the programs in dosbox or related to grabbing and/or releasing the mouse.

Ah, now I think I understand. The problem is a bit bigger than just a couple of DOSBox programs. It could be the mouse driver, as SlackerLX suggested. Try editing your dosbox.conf to not load a mouse driver, then you can try manually loading mouse.com or an alternate driver, maybe something from an old mouse driver disk.
You might also look at the driver you have loaded for X.

Exactly. So far, I have been unable to figure out how to not load the default mouse driver. I can't find any options for dosbox.conf that will allow me to do this. I have mouse.com, as well as a couple other drivers, but they won't load if the default driver is functioning. Maybe I just haven't looked in the right place. As for the X windows mouse driver, every time I try and change the mouse type in YaST, then X refuses to load telling me I have a bad configuration. If I even so much as edit the number of buttons in my xorg.conf file it won't load. I'm guessing something is still not quite right with the ATI video driver (poor hardware choice on my part); but that is a whole other can of worms. I'm about to switch to an old generic three button PS/2 mouse, and if I can get X to play nicely I'll see if that helps. When X isn't running, dosbox won't load because it can't find a mouse. I don't know if that is typical or not, but it might be another piece of the puzzle.

AHA! It is definitely the mouse driver in X. I unplugged the USB mouse, plugged in a PS/2 mouse, ran sax2 and accepted the default settings. The mouse now behaves properly in dosbox. How bizarre. Now I just have to figure out if I can get my wheel mouse (Logitech M310) to work with a different driver or setting that will play nicely with dosbox. I could stick with the old one, but the wheel is a real life saver for zooming in Pro/E. Thanks for all the suggestions.

If I connect the wheel mouse to the PS/2 port using a USB to PS/2 adapter, everything works fine. In dosbox the mouse behaves the same as my generic three button PS/2 mouse, and in Linux the wheel works. Here is the difference in the xorg.conf files.

When connected to the USB port:
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Buttons" "8"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

When connected to the PS/2 port:
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "Buttons" "8"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Name" "ImExPS/2 Logitech MX Mouse"
Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
Option "Vendor" "Sysp"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Both are using the same protocol, and I don't think the name or vendor settings would make any difference. I have no idea why the PS/2 port works correctly while the USB does not.

After reading your recent posts and some thought, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that DOS never really had any USB support.

Hello everyone,
I had an issue with DosBOX, where the mouse cursor was invisible in a game.
Inspired by this thread I looked at my xorg.conf,
and my pointer devices did not have the "SendCoreEvents" option on in the ServerLayout section.
This is something that aticonfig seems to do.

I hope this helps someone.

--
"The path to Enlightenment is /usr/bin/enlightenment"
--Unknown

Vermind

Welcome to LQ and, even though you posted in an old thread, you did some fine troubleshooting. That's one reason I always prefer to manually edit config files. An automated utility will do a pretty good job but, as you discovered, tends to miss some little things.

Sorry to resurrect a very old thread, but I found it while googling for a similar problem that I had with Dosbox 0.73 on Slackware. Since I've now fixed my problem I thought of posting it here in case it may be useful to someone else.
I found that for me the problem was a "sensitivity" setting too high in the dosbox config file, reduced it and the mouse works fine.