DOS ain't dead

I cannot find real DOS USB mouse driver, except oxci.exe and
uhci.exe from Norton Ghost. I tried both. They worked on several
machines, but not on all I tested. And these drivers need much memory.

Does anybody know any alternate drivers?

Please, do not tell me to use USB to PS2 adapter. My new motherboard
does not have PS2 ports. And please, no DOS extenders, emulators and
virtual machines for DOS; if we abandon real DOS, then DOS is dead,
and so is this forum.

> I cannot find real DOS USB mouse driver, except oxci.exe and
> uhci.exe from Norton Ghost. I tried both. They worked on several
> machines, but not on all I tested. And these drivers need much memory.
>
> Does anybody know any alternate drivers?
>
> Please, do not tell me to use USB to PS2 adapter. My new motherboard
> does not have PS2 ports. And please, no DOS extenders, emulators and
> virtual machines for DOS; if we abandon real DOS, then DOS is dead,
> and so is this forum.
Doesn't BIOS/CSM emulate USB Mouse to PS/2 one?

> > I cannot find real DOS USB mouse driver, except oxci.exe and
> > uhci.exe from Norton Ghost. I tried both. They worked on several
> > machines, but not on all I tested. And these drivers need much memory.
> >
> > Does anybody know any alternate drivers?
> >
> > Please, do not tell me to use USB to PS2 adapter. My new motherboard
> > does not have PS2 ports. And please, no DOS extenders, emulators and
> > virtual machines for DOS; if we abandon real DOS, then DOS is dead,
> > and so is this forum.
> Doesn't BIOS/CSM emulate USB Mouse to PS/2 one?
That crippled Award BIOS cannot support PS/2. They wanted to save money,
and used small BIOS memory chip. So they removed floppy, IDE, Firewire,
PS/2, and serial protocoll support. Also there is no LPT port, so I can
use only USB printers. That motherboard has 12 SATA connectors (four of
them are for external SATA disks), a lot of PCI slots and USB connectors.

You can try my USB drivers, but they currently only work with UHCI USB Host Controllers (those made by Intel and Via). They include drivers for mice and printers, among other things.

However, the printer driver only emulates the parallel port -- it does not do any protocol conversion. As long as your program(s) can "talk" to the printer in their native language, you're OK. Text-only printing usually works OK, as long as your printer can do text printing (a lot of newer ones can't). I've also had pretty good luck with graphics printing as long I stick with something like HP's PCL or sometimes even PostScript. I've also been able to use really old parallel printers (like dot-matrix printers) with a USB-to-parallel port adapter cable (USB on the computer end of the cable and parallel/Centronics on the printer end).

You can downloiad the drivers from:

http://bretjohnson.us

> You can try my USB drivers, but they currently only work with UHCI USB Host
> Controllers (those made by Intel and Via). They include drivers for mice
> and printers, among other things.
>
> However, the printer driver only emulates the parallel port -- it does not
> do any protocol conversion. As long as your program(s) can "talk" to the
> printer in their native language, you're OK. Text-only printing usually
> works OK, as long as your printer can do text printing (a lot of newer ones
> can't). I've also had pretty good luck with graphics printing as long I
> stick with something like HP's PCL or sometimes even PostScript. I've also
> been able to use really old parallel printers (like dot-matrix printers)
> with a USB-to-parallel port adapter cable (USB on the computer end of the
> cable and parallel/Centronics on the printer end).
>
> You can downloiad the drivers from:
>
> http://bretjohnson.us

Thanks.

> Please, do not tell me to use USB to PS2 adapter. My new motherboard
> does not have PS2 ports. And please, no DOS extenders, emulators and
> virtual machines for DOS; if we abandon real DOS, then DOS is dead,
> and so is this forum.

I wonder they had dropped USB legacy support from BIOS - bad times coming. Maybe your SuperIO still supports 2 PS/2 native ports but they lazy bastards didn't routed it out to the connectors so you'd need to do some wiring like me on Gigabyte when I wanted 2 PS/2 instead of crippled one :)

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> I wonder they had dropped USB legacy support from BIOS - bad times coming.
> Maybe your SuperIO still supports 2 PS/2 native ports but they lazy
> bastards didn't routed it out to the connectors so you'd need to do
> some wiring like
> me on Gigabyte when I wanted 2 PS/2 instead of crippled one :)

USBMOUSE 0.10 by Bret E. Johnson works for my USB mouse. The wheel does
not work, but I do not care. I will try his MOUSKEYS 3.05 with
Ninho's WheelK v1. Maybe that will support mouse wheel.

Glad you got the USB mouse to work for you.

In DOS, each individual program that wants/needs to use a mouse must do it internally -- there is no "universal" support for mice in DOS like there is in Windows. I'd say maybe less than 10% of the DOS programs know how to use a mouse -- most of them don't. And, of the ones that know how to use a mouse, there are only a handful that know how to use a wheel -- those are extremely rare.

MOUSKEYS will allow many programs to use a mouse (you can even use a mouse at the DOS prompt), but using MOUSKEYS will never work as well as a program that supports a mouse natively. I made MOUSKEYS a long time ago, before DOS even supported wheels. If I ever release a new version of MOUSKEYS (which I may do someday), it will include support for wheels. I haven't tried Ninho's program myself.

> Glad you got the USB mouse to work for you.
>
> In DOS, each individual program that wants/needs to use a mouse must do it
> internally -- there is no "universal" support for mice in DOS like there is
> in Windows. I'd say maybe less than 10% of the DOS programs know how to
> use a mouse -- most of them don't. And, of the ones that know how to use a
> mouse, there are only a handful that know how to use a wheel -- those are
> extremely rare.
>
> MOUSKEYS will allow many programs to use a mouse (you can even use a mouse
> at the DOS prompt), but using MOUSKEYS will never work as well as a program
> that supports a mouse natively. I made MOUSKEYS a long time ago, before
> DOS even supported wheels. If I ever release a new version of MOUSKEYS
> (which I may do someday), it will include support for wheels. I haven't
> tried Ninho's program myself.

Ninho's WheelK v1 does not work with MOUSKEYS and Norton GHOST DOS USB
mouse drivers.