Physical mouse, S-Pen and others

Physical mouse

Android supports physical mouse very long time, however fully supported is only from Android 8+. Older systems are limited.
Android 7 and older
Older systems will see double cursor – game cursor and android cursor. Biggest limitation is that android stops sending mouse coordinates when cursor reaches screen borders. This can be fixed switching from “Relative mouse” to “Absolute mouse”. However not every game supports absolute mouse. Some games can support absolute mouse after manual mouse resolution setup in advanced settings. By absolute mouse is recommended to make a screen a bit smaller (in “Adjust screen” menu) and center it (use long touch gesture to unlock screen). Else may happen, that mouse will not scroll in some direction.
Android 8+
Android 8 and newer systems fully support physical mouse. By default is double cursor displayed, but can be hidden by pressing mouse wheel. Wheel up displays menu and wheel down toggles android cursor visibility (The same can be done with “Special widget”, see action “Capture pointer”). In this case are coordinates reported correctly.
Summary

•devices with android 6 and older can’t hide double cursor and must use absolute or relative mode
•devices with android 7 can hide double cursor, but must use absolute or relative mouse mode
•devices with android 8+ can enjoy fully functional physical mouse without double cursor and without any limitations
•devices with android 7+ can toggle android cursor visibility with mouse wheel DOWN action (or with Special widget)

Samsung S-Pen

Samsung Galaxy Note devices are compatible with special S-Pen stylus, very useful tool for playing old dos games. Stylus supports hovering over screen without touch, this event is translated by Magic Dosbox to mouse movement. Touching screen emulates one of three mouse buttons, by default left. S-Pen offers one special button for displaying Samsung menu. On devices with Kitkat (android 4.4) is this button well supported and Magic Dosbox translates it to right mouse click, in higher versions Samsung added restrictions which prevent its correct functionality. This was reason why S-Pen supports now LongPress and DoubleTap gestures (since version 69).

Virtual keyboards

Android devices are always shipped with some kind of virtual keyboard. While they look nice and compact, they are often not very compatible with desktop keyboards. Magic Dosbox tries convert input from these keyboards to standard DOS keys and signals, however it is not possible in every case. Virtual keyboards are more or less compatible with desktop keyboard and this affects usability with DOS emulator. This is reason why we added our own virtual keyboard, fully compatible with MS-DOS. It contains almost every key of physical keyboard. Some special keys are not included, however, this issue can be easily fixed with adding key widget on the screen.

Physical keyboard

Connecting physical keyboard solves various issues with stock virtual keyboard. However you can face some problems. Pressing ESC key on physical keyboard emulates BACK button of android device. This is critical, Magic Dosbox uses BACK button for handling in game main menu. This means, that instead correct ESC key is displayed menu for controlling in-game emulator options. To fix it, open Advanced Settings and disable it. From now is menu displayed by holding ESC, instead simple press. May happen that some keys on physical keyboard are doing special actions like increasing/decreasing volume or they don’t work correctly. In this case would be fine rebind them to old DOS keys. Do it in mapper/voodoo control menu.

Physical gamepad

Magic dosbox can bind keys, widgets, mouse and other events to physical gamepad very well. While currently is not possible control whole Magic Dosbox with gamepad, playing games works very well. Use Mapper/Voodoo control for binding events to gamepad. If gamepad does nothing, please try first gamepad tester app from google play.