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Monday, April 9, 2012

PS2/Serial mouse in FreeDOS

I have a PS/2 mouse connected to PS/2-Serial converter which is plugged in my old 386 FreeDOS machine. Using the mouse with ctmouse gave me a little trouble but here is how I did it:

First I loaded ctmouse with the /M option (Mouse System / Genius):

C:\>ctmouse /M
CuteMouse v2.1 beta4 [FreeDOS]
Installed at COM1 (03F8h/IRQ4) in Mouse Systems mode

Then I forced ctmouse to use the mouse found at COM1 (S1) and IRQ4 (4):

C:\>ctmouse /S14
CuteMouse v2.1 beta4 [FreeDOS]
Resident part reset to COM1 (03F8h/IRQ4) in Microsoft mode

With these settings I was able to use my PS2 mouse on a serial adapter. When I loaded the driver directly with the /S14 option then it didn't worked anymore.
I tried a lot of options but these seems to be the best for me. The /3 option also works for a three button mouse (instead of the /S14 option). To use the correct driver settings I added the following lines to my AUTOEXEC.BAT:

C:\>edit AUTOEXEC.BAT
...
REM MOUSE
C:\FDOS\BIN\CTMOUSE /M
C:\FDOS\BIN\CTMOUSE /S14
REM C:\FDOS\BIN\CTMOUSE /3
...

1 comment:

  1. Thank you. This helped me as I had trouble getting my serial mouse on a tecra 8000 (p2 laptop) to be recognized. CTmouse by default would try to load the ps/2 port even though nothing was plugged in there.

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