The dosemu HOWTO: Parallel ports, serial ports and mice

To have a chance to log port access, by default every port access produces an exception out of vm86-mode. This takes some time. If you don't want to log port access, use the keyword "fast" in the appropriate port statement.

4.3 Where are the (microsoft compatible) mouse drivers?

Tom Kimball (tk@pssparc2.oc.com) reported (93/11/24) that

Several people said to use a different mouse driver and suggested some. I found a couple that seem to work fine.

   oak.oakland.edu:/pub/msdos/mouse/mouse701.zip   (mscmouse)
   oak.oakland.edu:/pub/msdos/mouse/gmous102.zip   (gmouse)

Normally you can use dosemu's internaldriver, so you don't need any additional mousedriver in dosemu outside winemu(97/2/10).

4.4 Why doesn't the mouse driver work?

Mark Rejhon (mdrejhon@magi.com) reported (95/4/7) that

If you start the mouse driver and it just hangs (it might actually take 30-60s), but if you are waiting longer than a minute for the mouse driver to start, try specifying the COM port that the mouse is on, at the mouse driver command line.

4.5 Why does dosemu clobber COM4?

Rob Janssen (rob@pe1chl.ampr.org) reported (94/3/24) that

According to jmorriso@bogomips.ee.ubc.ca, "dosemu still clobbers COM4 (0x2e8, IRQ 5). 0x2e8 isn't in ports{} in config. I have to run setserial /dev/cua3 irq 5 on it after dosemu exits."

This is caused by your VGA BIOS. I have found that by enabling the IO port trace and seeing where it was clobbered.

Disable the "allowvideoportaccess on" line in config and it will work fine. When you then have problems with the video, try to enable more selective ranges of IO addresses (e.g., 40-43).

4.6 How do I use dosemu over the serial ports?

4.7 How can I switch between dosemu and a shell over the serial line?

John Taylor (taylor@pollux.cs.uga.edu) reported (94/5/25) that

I am running Linux 1.1.13 and want to point out a great feature that should be protected and not taken out (IMHO). With the 52 version, I can run the program, "screen." From screen, i can invoke dos -D-a. What is really great (IMHO) is the screen commands (the CTRL-A cmds) still work. This means I can do a CTRL-A C and add another unix shell, and switch between the two (DOS / UNIX). This allows me to use dosemu over the serial line really well, because switching is made easy.

4.8 How can I get the parallel ports to work?

The dosemu.conf has lines at the end to redirect printers to either lpr or a file. If you want direct access to the bare metal, comment out these emulation lines, and add the line