Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
DOS didn’t originally come with mouse drivers. mouse.com or similarly came on a disk with your Microsoft PS/2 mouse or similar.
If you’re looking for a current mouse driver for DOS on old PCs or running in a VM, I just found an open source project CuteMouse recommended and it works great with DOS 6.22 running under UTM/QEMU
Here’s a weird one. While running Borland Turbo C++ in a VM on UTM/QEMU, every cursor keypress appears to jump 2 lines. A quick Google found this post, and there’s a QEMU flag that you can add to your VM settings to apply a fix for this behavior:
-global i8042.kbd-throttle=on
The key x86 hardware spec in UTM for DOS, Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 guests in order to get CDROM support appears to be this 1996 one:
If you pick the 2009 PC, most installers will fail when you get to the MSCDEX CDROM drivers.
Let’s attach the floppy disk images and start it up!
Done!
A while back I was playing with UTM to setup an x86 VM on my M1 MacBook to install Windows 98 from an iso. I got as far as booting and starting the install but then ran into issue with the MSCDEX driver on subsequent boots during the install where it would no longer see the virtual CDROM drive and so could not complete the install:
From some additional playing around, it seems there is a major difference in the virtualized x86 PC hardware between this x86 2009 option which has the CDROM driver issue:
and this older 1996 version which does work and the install will complete successfully:
A couple of additional findings:
In the Input settings disable USB input (the default is USB3.0 support) and this will give you a mouse:
Success!
