bb16@prism.gatech.EDU (Scott Bostater) (03/29/91)
A co-worker recently got a new MS-Mouse for his computer. The driver, version
7.04, uses a graphics cursor even while in text mode. I'm talking a true
graphics cursor, not just redefining the text cursor symbol to be a pointing
arrow. I can cover up half a character on one line and half the character
on the line below it. This happens in everything we tried except WP5.1
I thought to myself "Slick! I wonder if this works on my mouse?" Which is
another MS-Mouse purchased 1.5 to 2 years ago. It worked fine. Another
co-worker saw it and decided to try it out on her mouse, a MS-mouse thats
about 3 years old (but its still the ergonomic style). It didn't work.
I took the driver home and tried it out on my ATI VGAWonder+ video board that
has a built in bus mouse and it didn't work there either.
As a point of reference, all four computers are 25 MHz 386's, all have Bus
mouses, 2 are running Dos 3.3 and 2 are running DOS 4.01 (one DOS 3.3 and
one DOS 4.0 machine worked), All have at least 2 MB of RAM, all are C&T
chip sets, etc. they're all very similiar machines (other than hard disks)
My questions are:
1. How do they do the graphics cursor in the first place? It's been a
long time since Micro$oft has impressed me, and this has certainly
tickled my fancy.
2. The only difference that I can see is the age of the bus mouse
controller (and the manufacturer). Has Micro$oft made some hardware
changes to the controller in recent years? I assumed that the
controller was a rather dumb piece of hardware because of the
exsistence of serial mice. Am I wrong in this assumption?
3. Could Micro$oft be checking to see if the bus controller is theirs and
disabling this feature if its not one of their own (and recent)?
4. Do any of the other mice manufacturers/software drivers have this
capability?
--
Scott Bostater Georgia Tech Research Institute - Radar Systems Analysis
"My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from Him" -Ps 62.1
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