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First post, by Rekrul

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Is it possible, in either the official DOSBox release, or in any of the SVN builds, to map a key to mouse movement. For example, you push the mouse forward and it sends Page Up to the emulated program, you pull the mouse back and it send Page Down.

I know you can't do this with the keymapper, but is there any way to edit the map file to do this?

I know, you're all wondering why I'd want to do this. Some early DOS games, notably Star Wars Dark Forces, won't let you assign the commands for look up and down to the mouse. You can assign every other function in the game, and you can assign them to a joystick, but you can't assign them to the mouse.

If there was a way to assign keys to mouse movement, you could fake it by having it send the keyboard commands for looking up and down when you moved the mouse forward and back. I know it wouldn't be as good as actual mouselook, but it has to beat using the keyboard or trying to play it with a joystick.

Unfortunately, it seems that the mouse is sacred and while there are bunches of programs for mapping keys to game controllers, I can't find a single program that lets you map keys to mouse functions.

Well, i did find one program that would let you map keys to the wheel, but it doesn't register in DOSBox.

Reply 2 of 3, by Rekrul

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Firtasik wrote:

Try GlovePIE. More info here.

Thank you! I have downloaded it and will try it soon.

I did try DarkXL for running Dark Forces and while I definitely like it, it's still got some bugs.

Reply 3 of 3, by Rekrul

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Just wanted to say thanks again for pointing me to the thread on adding mouse aim to Dark Forces. I tried it out and it works surprisingly well. Not as good as true mouselook, since the look up/down function has a fixed speed, but much better than having to use the keyboard.

I wish I'd had GlovePIE when I played through Blood. It would have been great to use the wheel for switching weapons.

By adding the required commands to a batch file that also runs DOSBox, you can even have GlovePIE start the appropriate script before starting the game in DOSBox. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to automatically close GlovePIE when you're done, but you can't have everything. 😀

Thanks again!