rasz_pl wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:36:

judging by the results MS Mouse 9.01 is also talking to PS/2 controller directly like CuteMouse 2.0a4, so no difference in the end

No, it is not. It uses the BIOS in 1 packet mode.

ahyeadude wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:14:

I was a big fan of CuteMouse, but after seeing the performance impact

Likely making CuteMouse use 1 packet will speedup in your system significantly, too, having the best of both worlds. CuteMouse is normally ridiculously speedy...

I really doubt this is something intrinsic to the mouse driver, rather just a poor BIOS that sleeps too much for packet synchronization.

I don't know what extra compatibility is gained if you use the BIOS rather than the PS/2 controller directly, but consider
A) MS always uses the BIOS even up to 9x (yes, even with a virtualized PS/2 controller).
and B) cutemouse guys got bitten by it and went back to using PS/2 BIOS.
I used to think this was to support "legacy USB" (i.e. BIOS support for MS mouses) but I have since realized that on most systems this is implemented by trapping the PS/2 IO ports directly with SMM rather than with BIOS code, so that can't be (and besides, it would be too much foresight...).

i found that with ms mouse 11 (or maybe already 9.x, didn't check), compared to 8.20, strangely they removed the /Px acceleration settings from the /? list. but in the mouse.lan file it still lists the corresponding profiles, and the driver seems to accept /p4. by the way, all of these drivers have interrupt rate settings - that may be something to look into for performance comparisons. the documentation is lacking in terms of what is default here (or rather, there is no seperate documentation on the image that's out there).

the file got quite a bit bigger compared to the 8.20 mouse.com i have though - 107kb vs. 36.7kb, and it will complain if there is no mouse.lan file in the same directory. don't get why it's packed with win95 .dlls either. and it seems even version 11 won't allow to fully unload the driver, making comparisons a bit annoying.

Thank you for this topic, I didn't know, I actually tested cutemouse with my Slot 1 build and it slows down quite noticeably, quake benchmark in 320 drops from 109,5 fps to 88.
I switched to microsoft drivers and the difference is much less noticeable, I do have a question though, I use a optical mouse with wheel but even if enabled on cutemouse I noticed that edit from dos 7.1 it doesn't work, I suppose that the program needs to support the wheel feature too other than the drivers?

think i've now noticed a speedup when comparing ms mouse 11 to 8.20 in games myself. so it may be a worthwile upgrade indeed, though i still find it annoying that supported commands would be removed from the list. maybe they ran into a limit in terms of how much text it could output.

and programs definitely need to support the wheel, not just in DOS, older win95 era games won't have any clue about it either.

auron wrote on 2024-10-16, 08:30:

think i've now noticed a speedup when comparing ms mouse 11 to 8.20 in games myself. so it may be a worthwile upgrade indeed, though i still find it annoying that supported commands would be removed from the list. maybe they ran into a limit in terms of how much text it could output.

and programs definitely need to support the wheel, not just in DOS, older win95 era games won't have any clue about it either.

Thank you, in this case I can happily switch to microsoft driver.

Edit: I did the same test on my Amd 5x86 build, with cute mouse when moving the cursor the performance drops to the performance of an dx2 66, with microsoft driver there is almost no difference.
Another build switched then... Later I will try other builds.

Tried the pentium 4 3.06ghz:
Quake 320:
No mouse movement: 93 fps
Cutemouse 2.1: 91,6 fps
Microsoft mouse 9.01: 92,6 fps

So I decided to give some tests with the same optical mouse 2 buttons + wheel, tests made on nssi with cpu benchmark, numbers in brackets are the kb of memory used:

Amd 5x86 133:
No mouse: 63088
CTMOUSE20: 62000 (3552)
CTMOUSE21: 43500 (3104)
DRMOUSE: 49735 (6544)
MOUSE: 62000 (24560)

According to those tests, the performance of ctmouse2.0 and microsoft mouse are the same, what changes is the memory foot print (huge on microsoft drivers), the dr mouse dr-dos is just meh...

upon further testing, as in something that isn't an FPS game, it was clear immediately that my concerns with ms mouse 11 were warranted - even though it appears to accept the /p4 switch, it doesn't do anything. so for whatever reason they really did take out the option to switch off acceleration, unless there is some other hidden way to do it.

then went to ms mouse 9.01, and that one comes with a useful GUI tool which shows that here, switching off acceleration is still possible. the problem with this one is, after about 3 minutes of gameplay, intermittent multi-second freezes happen, and eventually the mouse completely stops working until a reboot. this happened three times, though on the third time it also locked up the system as well. so it looks like this driver is not compatible with my logitech M-SBF96 mouse, unless there is a setting to change, but i didn't bother with that so far.

What about the Logitech mouse driver?
It supports cloaking in later versions and thus requires just 1 KB of conventional memory for its stub.

Re: Can I skip Smartdrive?

Edit: Back in the 90s I had used a Genius mouse and gmouse.com..
Another vintage driver I've used to use was MS Mouse 6.24BZ.
It was very Windows 2.03 friendly, it didn't mess up the native Windows mouse driver.

PS: Uwe Sieber's site has a bunch of old mouse drivers..
https://www.uwe-sieber.de/util_e.html

I never liked ctmouse, neither for its compatibility nor its cursor behavior (has a certain acceleration profile that I utterly hate).

MS Mouse is a great driver, and GMouse.com was the golden standard back in the 386 days.
I'd imagine the slowdowns mentioned here would have been detected by PC Magazine or any other lab if it was really noticeable. Mouse games and Windows 3.1 were all over the place, and a 50% slowdown wouldn't have gone unnoticed. Sierra games ran on potatoes and mouse movement never seemed to cause any slowdowns even on a 286 running SQ4 VGA.

I personally prefer using the mouse's manufacturer's driver. GMouse for Genius, MS Mouse for Microsoft, and LMouse for Logitech. I wouldn't bother with other mouse brands generally.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-19, 04:47:

What about the Logitech mouse driver? It supports cloaking in later versions and thus requires just 1 KB of conventional memory […]
Show full quote

What about the Logitech mouse driver?
It supports cloaking in later versions and thus requires just 1 KB of conventional memory for its stub.

Re: Can I skip Smartdrive?

Edit: Back in the 90s I had used a Genius mouse and gmouse.com..
Another vintage driver I've used to use was MS Mouse 6.24BZ.
It was very Windows 2.03 friendly, it didn't mess up the native Windows mouse driver.

PS: Uwe Sieber's site has a bunch of old mouse drivers..
https://www.uwe-sieber.de/util_e.html

thanks, have tested logitech 6.50 and 7.30. they both do allow to switch off acceleration and have quite a few options in general. with 7.30 i've noticed however that in doom, with this driver i'm getting a lot of extra hitches. apparently, this 1997 driver is quite heavy.

with 6.50 from 1995, things are better and i'd have to compare a few times to see if there are really extra hitches compared to ms 8.20. one thing with both logitech drivers though is, it seems the adjustable sensitivity range is smaller than with the microsoft driver. s10 with logitech seemed less sensitive than h80 with ms 8.20. that's really just relevant with acceleration off, but there might be some edge case game where the extra range would help.

with the same system i've also run some quick benchmarks with 3dbench2 as in this post. hardware is a p90 with neptune chipset and a matrox millennium. also, acceleration was disabled with every driver:

baseline (no drivers loaded): 79.5
ms mouse 8.20: 79.3
logitech 6.50: 78.7
logitech 7.30: 78.7

so oddly the two drivers show identical numbers here despite quite different results in practice. the 1997 driver must be doing something else that interferes with demanding games. and the logitech both bench slower than even the old ms 8.20, which was benched in this thread to be slower than the later ones. i'm wondering why the logitech drivers even report a VGA being present - doesn't seem like something that should concern a mouse driver, or maybe it does, given all the options with blinking cursors and such.

Well not everything is perfect. I'm having issues with the microsoft mouse drivers and jemmex, if I use the old good emm386 it gets all loaded into umb, while if I use jemmex it stays or in conventional memory or not completely load into umb. Sure cute mouse doesn't suffer from this problem due to the very low memory footprint compared to microsoft driver.
As for performance wise the difference is clearly noticeable, what may avoid noticing it it's that you need to move the mouse every moment because the gap just stop as soon the mouse is not moving.

Unlucky I need to add another con to microsoft mouse driver 9.01. When I use it on my pentium 4 build it makes the computer crash with memory errors.