Is the tablet device listed as joystick in the dosbox console window?

how do i check for that?

Well for joystick-type devices there should be something in the console window
like "using joystick xyz...".

Which exact dosbox version are you using, and on what OS?

i have dosbox 0.70 and windows XP. sp2. toshiba m400 tablet

it works fine with the track touch pad thing, its just the tablet pen that acts like a joystick.

Um well if SDL sees it as joystick device it's no wonder that it behaves like that.
That's why i'm asking if it is displayed as such in the console window.

hmm... i think i need more specific directions of where to look, im a dosbox noob 😀

i open it, and i see 2 windows: a status window, and a dos prompt window.

what do i do from here too check if its is set as a joystick?

That status window.
Do you have a joystick? Plug it in (no tablet stuff attached) and it should
give a message in that window when dosbox starts. If the tablet does
the same, it's recognized as joystick as well.
If it isn't, it could be queried through the mouse interface most likely.

hmm... i think i have screwed up. the tablet im referring to is a laptop, with the tablet stuff built in, not a peripheral... a tablet pc. the status window just says "loading primary settings from config file"
and
"MIDO: opened device:win32"
those are the only messages i get

sorry, that should be "MIDI" ...i cant find the edit button 😀

Ok what's the input then? Touch pad?

well the input device is the screen... or the sensor built into the screen. i dunno what dosbox would see it as

I have the same issue with my hp TC1100 tabletPC.

A tabletPC uses a WACOM tablet built-in to the screen. A pen held over the screen at any point moves the mouse cursor to that point (in windows).

In DosBox 0.72 instead of the cursor following the pen, it jumps crazily to the edges of the screen. I noticed in one case I could control it loosely by only moving the pen in the upper right quarter - as if the entire screen coordinates were mapped to the upper right 320x240. However, it is very jittery and unplayable!

I attempted tweaking the fullscreen resolution from original to my computer's native resolution of 1024x768, but it had not effect on the mouse tracking.

It must have something to do with how the mouse is tracked - traditional mice only provide a change in position to the PC. However, the tablet input moves the mouse cursor to the position the pen hits the screen an absolute coordinate instead of a change in coordinate. I am posting this in the development forum as well to see if I can get some help looking at the DosBox source code for the mouse interpretation.

EDIT: I found a thread from last year with some development info on trying to fix the problem here: Wacom Tablet+Dosbox+Autodesk Animator Pro

yeah, I tried this also with my TC1100 and it's no joy (not to mention that my 800 MHz Centrino is just not very powerful and thus not very enjoyable with Dosbox).

Edit: Forgen: You overdid it a bit with your problem plugin into varios threads. In the end it would have sufficed to write in one or start a new thread...

This might help:
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=35786
This guy seems to have done something to fix this for him and one game:

The patch is directinput proxy which changes coordinates from relative to sort-of-absolute.

Maybe ask around on the SDL mailing list. The SDL mouse event contains
an absolute and a relative position value (both are/should be valid).