First post, by dodleh
Dosbox is, no doubt, a very powerful emulator with good performance and compatibility. However, I have noticed for a long time (more than 10 years) an issue with Dosbox (be it classic SVN or ECE).
I assume that Dosbox incorporates a mouse driver similar to cutemouse. I may be wrong but it seems that part of its behavior was seen before with cutemouse. For obvious reasons the Dosbox mouse driver is not a TSR, it is directly incorporated into the emulation backend, with no outside control. In general, it works quite right.
The problem: Microsoft Windows 3.x. I know and I fully agree that Dosbox is not made for this dos extender but it is clearly used as such. Graphics is fine, accuracy is good. On the other side, mouse handling is less than great. For instance, mouse sensitivity control from the Dosbox config file has no influence. Even worse, opening a dos-prompt window may crash Dosbox. However, even that is solvable and switching from full-screen to window mode can work. Now, the real issue: mouse movement is choppy (presumably due to interrupt handling but the mouse driver can also be blamed), and, worse, if a windowed dos prompt session is started, as soon as the application being run (ms-dos edit) uses the mouse, the entire Windows GUI crashes to dos.
I am pretty sure that there could be a way to disable the integrated mouse support in Dosbox so that a typical MS mouse driver can be loaded as a TSR. In that circumstance, running Windows 3.x might be a different experience (it has to be tested). Of course, a simple parameter to switch in the config file is the perfect approach but I have not seen any such implementation upto now.
I appreciate any discussion regarding this issue. Thank you.