[KGMattson]

Hi! First of all, great work with the app, its awesome! But I do have a small issue with the “double mouse cursors” though. Im talking about the inbuild android mouse cursor and the “in-game-dos-cursor”….And yes, I know that in android 8+ you have the ability to hide the cursor, and of course you can root your device to acheive this aswell. But Im on android 6 and I dont like to root my device. In fact, the double mouse cursors does not bother me, the thing that bother me though is that the cursors dont syncronise at all. This is extremely annyoying when playing strategygames like Red Alert, its hard to focus on the “real” cursor and I find myself constant looking at the “fake android cursor” instead. The option to lock them on eachother, to syncronise them would be really nice to have. This option is in fact implemented in the ScummVM app (for android). If you plug in your OTG-mouse and start up any mouse driven game in scummvm, the two cursors are present but they are locked tight on eachother and syncronise perfect. My question is therefore, is there any way to make this happend in magic dosbox aswell?

[admin]

Hi, thank you for warm words. I think it is not possible. I can check how mdosbox sends events from physical mouse to dosbox, but if i remeber it well, i send them directly, unlike virtual mouse. This means, if it does not work then i dont know how to fix it. Unlike scummv, dosbox does not know cursor location and can’t set it on specific location. Absolute mouse, target widget and similar implemented functions are hack which roughly bring effect of touch mouse. I like to help, but i dont know how.

[KGMattson]

Ah, ok. I understand! Thanks anyway! 🙂

[Al ex]

Unlike Dosbox, ScummVM doesn’t emulate games, but works as an interpreter. The advantage is that it’s not restricted by all the weird stuff DOS programmers did (to mouse implementation, for example ?).

On the other hand, emulators like Dosbox are much closer to the original, and just run games, whereas in ScummVM, the devs need to code support for each game individually.

[admin]

The full truth is that “moonlight game streaming” has working solution, it installs custom input device driver like a resident program in android executable memory. It allows stealing linux events before they are processed by android. But it is not implemented in mdosbox, i tried, but it is hard and I did not succeed with it. And then I was not more interested when android 8 came with fix.

[Al ex]

Yes. ScummVM only used the game data, and runs it independently from the original executable files, so it can easily implement its own mouse controls. Hence it is not an emulator, but an interpreter, and, while great for nostalgia, never 100% like the real thing.
Whereas Dosbox, and every other emulator, offers the full experience, including all flaws and drawbacks that were present in the original OS and games.

Moonlight streaming does another thing, and I’m not even sure if it would work out for all DOS games. Because you would still have to deal with the weird input controls those devs of old were doing. So chances are that work put into a similar implementation would be ultimately a waste of time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Author]

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