[SOLVED] Dosbox not capturing mouse movements

Hello,

I have Dosbox 0.74 installed in a fully updated Manjaro Linux desktop. Even though it worked fine before, there is a relatively recent problem which is that Dosbox can capture my mouse clicks, but *not* mouse movements.

I can tell because I can click my mouse to skip intro screens in games, but my mouse cursor's movements is not captured by Dosbox. This appears to be a broader problem because I also experience the same thing when running DOS games from GoG which runs from GoG's own packaged Dosbox. I made sure that mouse "autolock" is set to true in my Dosbox configuration, but that didn't help.

How do I troubleshoot this problem? Thank you.

Congrats on having Dosbox do anything for you. Is yours a USB mouse, or serial port?

Dos, i.e. IBM PC-DOS or m$ M$-DOS (same thing, basically) really was awful.The few peripheral parts it knew about (serial & parallel ports, the 16 bit ISA bus, and the firmly allocated I/O and interrupts with zero feedback, memory over 640k needing a driver) are all 15-20 years obsolete. What it DIDN'T know about (PCIE, PCI, USB 1/2/3, sd cards, advanced file systems, PNP devices, Gigs of ram, DECENT Graphics cards, fast multicore cpus & dsps, etc.) are what we use today. The later Dos versions had emm386.exe whose function in life was to make extended memory (over 1 MB) pretend to be expanded memory (=a few k of ram on an ISA card with an address between 640k and 1023k because Dos did funny thgings with the A20 line seeing as nobody ever was going to want more than 1MB of ram :-/).

I'd try to give it the mouse on a pretend serial port or check what wheeze it's using to get around that usb -->serial port issue.

Originally Posted by business_kid Congrats on having Dosbox do anything for you.

Dosbox has always worked just fine for me, have you had many problems with it before?

Originally Posted by business_kid Is yours a USB mouse, or serial port?

Originally Posted by business_kid I'd try to give it the mouse on a pretend serial port or check what wheeze it's using to get around that usb -->serial port issue.

What is a wheeze? My physical mouse is connected via USB, but that has never been a problem. AFAIK Dosbox does not present the physical mouse to programs it runs as USB so is there something else to check? Thanks.

I suspect it is a xorg-server problem and probably something along the lines of the thread below. Are you running dosbox .74-2?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=237587

Maybe contact the dosbox developers and see if they might have any ideas.

Uh, business_kid, do you even know what DosBox is? It's an emulator, like ZSNES, and it runs on modern OSses and modern hardware. It doesn't make you deal with any of the issues that you mentioned.

Originally Posted by michaelk I suspect it is a xorg-server problem and probably something along the lines of the thread below. Are you running dosbox .74-2? https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=237587

I followed that link and it appears to describe my problem. I tried setting "autolock" to FALSE as suggested and it worked for me when trying some Dosbox programs but not others. When it doesn't work well, I mean that the mouse cursor would only be captured for a small part of the program's screen. If I move my mouse cursor outside of that area, it jumps out of the Dosbox window and back into my host system. Very strange.

Anyways, I guess it is indeed a problem with xorg as suggested in that thread. But the update to xorg 1.20 happened months ago and I no longer have the package cache to downgrade it...

Originally Posted by michaelk Maybe contact the dosbox developers and see if they might have any ideas.

Thank you for suggesting this! After some searching I came across a very similar thread on the Dosbox forums:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=62703

Should I continue there?

Originally Posted by dugan Uh, business_kid, do you even know what DosBox is? It's an emulator, like ZSNES, and it runs on modern OSses and modern hardware. It doesn't make you deal with any of the issues that you mentioned.

Yeah, installed it a while back and it was just a PITA. I could have used it - then.

I've since reluctantly dragged myself into this millenium, ditching/selling old machinery along the way.

Should I continue there?

I would think so. The developers would have a better idea how it all works...

Originally Posted by michaelk I would think so. The developers would have a better how it all works...

OK, then, I will do that. Thanks for your help, and for the record setting "autolock = FALSE" works as a partial fix.