A serial mouse going through DOSBox's serial port emulation is known to have noticeable latency, but you only need to do that if the game/application only supports a serial mouse and not a ps/2 style mouse, or if you want to have two mice (one ps/2, one serial) for some reason.

Known to have noticeable latency? Really?

Tass Times in Tonetown not running correctly
Read robertmo's last comment.

Known to those that have tried hooking up a serial mouse and using it. Perhaps not known to others. 😉

In Settlers its barely noticable and does not shoot over, even with an USB converter. Keep in mind that the serial mouse protocol takes ~22 milliseconds for one update while PS/2 etc. are faster. DOSBox adds up to 1ms to the delay, unless the cycles are set wrong or some scheduling bug is being hit.

I've read that serial mice are 40hz, so 25ms per report, but maybe there's overhead or something. I haven't tried the serial mouse extensively, but in Windows 1.x with its bus/serial mouse driver, and in Tass Times, the delay is far more exaggerated than you describe.

Were you using a real serial port or USB?

Real serial. My Intel motherboard has one serial and one parallel port: COM1 and LPT1. As robertmo pointed out in that other thread, I plugged the mouse in after WinXP had started up to avoid it being detected.

Ah, with a real serial port I get the delay. Turn off FIFO buffers on the host (device manager) and restart the computer. Helped me.

With FIFO on the serial interface waits a certain amount of time after receiving data before triggering an interrupt. It hopes the buffer gets filled up a bit more. The mouse however sends only 3 bytes in a row which is not enough to reach the limit.

If you don't want to plug off the mouse every time:
Plug it in, switch your computer on, let it install.
Then deactivate (not uninstall) it in the device manager.

I'm using a gyration mouse with a usb connection. Autocad 10 has two choices for mice: mouse systems 3 button/ms or logitech 3 button.
I'm using the mouse systems driver in autocad. The delay is worse when I don't use the direct serial setting in dosbox conf.

read what hal wrote and use that.

I tried what hal said and it doesn't improve the mouse response

[Thread moved to DOSBox Games/Apps. Section]

Just running NortonCommander in Dosbox still gives me inaccurate mouse response so I don't think this has anything to do with the autocad drivers.

I tried disabling the windows mouse and connecting a serial mouse to com1 with the serial mouse driver in autoexec.bat in dosbox.conf. It works but even a little worse than the windows mouse. I'm still using serial1 as directserial in doscox.conf. Should that be set to dummy or something else?

I tried setting dosbox.conf to serial1=dummy with the windows mouse disabled but the mouse still is slack in dosbox. If I move the mouse up and down about once a second the cursor is actually down when my mouse is up and vice versa.

Finally got the mouse working great!
I changed the fullscreen parameter to false istead of true
I changed the windowresolution param from original to 1350x1080
(I'm using a 1920x1080 screen)
The mouse is perfect now, accurate and everything.

SO THERE IT IS : FULLSCREEN=TRUE SCREWS UP THE MOUSE