First post, by kanecvr
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi guys. I'd like to use a USB mouse in DOS and windows 95, but so far, after months of on-off searching and documentation I've so far not been able to find a working solution.
I'm sure some of you at one point have encountered the following scenario: owning a good 486 or socket 7 mainboard with no (or poor) PS/2 mouse support, forcing you to use a Serial ball mouse. Those are also quite rare nowadays - finding a working one is not always easy or cheap. After browsing ebay I've come across serial mice costing anywhere from 20 to 100$ and they are neither very accurate or comfortable.
The thing is, most PCI 486 boards will work fine with a PCI USB controller installed and there's even win95 usb mass storage drivers - but unfortunately win95 does not have Human Interface Device support, witch means that mice, keyboards and other USB peripherals will not install automatically. Sure, one could use win98 witch automatically detects the controller and peripherals, but performance is stunted on slow machines compared to DOS and win95. For example, my Cyrix 586 +Voodoo 1 does 18-19 fps in GLQuake under win95 with FPU enhancements enables, but in win98 only manages a meager 16.2-16.5. The problem is of course, in win95 I can only use an old choppy serial ball mouse.
Now some of you might be thinking "there's USB mouse drivers for win95 aren't there?" - and you would be partially right. I did locate win95 drivers for SOME USB mice, but only very few and usually stuff by logitech which I don't own - also the drivers will not work with other mice, and they do not enable generic HID support in win95 - I tried. Several times. No dice.
Most newer machines allow you to use USB mice and keyboards via "USB Legacy Emulation" and "USB Keyboard and Mouse Support" in bios, but this is a luxury only afforded to socket 370 / socket a systems and newer - looking for such a toggle on older boards is a waste of time. Some socket 7 boards like the VIA MVP3 do have USB keyboard support, but no USB mouse support under DOS. Then again, those have proper PS/2 support and run win98 effortlessly unlike a socket 3 board.
While trying to get USB mice to work on my 486 machines, I've encountered the following issues:
- I could not find a working driver to support USB mice in DOS - there are USB drivers - like usbaspi.sys but mice will either not work at all, the cursor will only move on one axis, or it will hang the system. A working driver is needed - please, if any of you know of a driver for DOS that allows the use of USB mice, let me know. I also believe some of you have some programming / assembly language knowledge - could one make such a driver? I have very little programming know-how and even less time to study for such a monumental (for me) task.
- Windows 95 does not have native HID support and while I could locate Mass Storage Drivers for win95, no one has bothered to make HID drivers. Same as before, am I wrong? Do any of you know of a way to get cheap generic modern USB mice to work on win95?
If any of you have any information on this topic, please share. It would help lots of retro enthusiasts.
P.S. - example : I have two UMC based 486 boards - one is a Pine 423 variant with no PS/2 whatsoever, the other is a Biostar MB8433UUD-A rev 1.0 witch has PS/2 but will not work with any of my 5! PS/2 mice sans a Logitech witch causes it to randomly freeze. The others it will not detect at all.