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Recommended PS/2 optical mice for DOS?

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Xenophage

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Feb 13, 2024
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I got this cheap Perixx PS/2 optical mouse for use on my 486. I was running the open source CTMOUSE driver for the past few weeks and never had any issues, but for some strange reason today the mouse started acting wonky. It seems that it will randomly get confused and treat x/y axis movements as mouse clicks and vice versa, and other random behavior. I thought maybe the SoundBlaster I installed yesterday was causing some kind of IRQ conflict, but the issue isn't resolved by changing the IRQ on the sound card. Stranger still, the mouse only has a problem in DOS, not in Windows. So, I installed the Microsoft DOS mouse drivers. The MS Mouse drivers will occasionally experience a moment of confusion, but clicking a mouse button seems to fix it and it will run fine for several minutes before it has another glitch. Much improved over CTMOUSE, but I'm left wondering what the cause of this sudden change in behavior might be. Perhaps some circuitry in the mouse has broken?

I'd like to test another mouse. So, what's your best recommendation?
 
Alright so, further investigation into my problem has indicated that the mouse is not the issue. I was able to find an old usb mouse with a ps/2 adapter, and it exhibited the same symptom. It just seems to randomly freak out and start inputting random values for everything. I wonder now if I might have a virus.
 
it seems to be more of a software or operating issue rather than a virus. but anyhow, you can try and use my portable antivirus to check for common boot and file viruses from the 80's and 90's. Just a couple of days ago a user from another forum suspected that he has a virus in his old IBM PS/2 and sure he did had Junkie virus was able to remove it using my AV
 

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Take the SoundBlaster card out entirely and see if it goes away?
 
MasawVx said:
it seems to be more of a software or operating issue rather than a virus. but anyhow, you can try and use my portable antivirus to check for common boot and file viruses from the 80's and 90's. Just a couple of days ago a user from another forum suspected that he has a virus in his old IBM PS/2 and sure he did had Junkie virus was able to remove it using my AV
Click to expand...
Thanks. I ended up formatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything, while performing virus checks on every floppy disk using f-prot. No viruses. All systems nominal. No idea what happened. It's possible I still have a virus lurking in some files that I had transferred via FTP. I will give your virus scanner a go as well.
 
MasawVx said:
it seems to be more of a software or operating issue rather than a virus. but anyhow, you can try and use my portable antivirus to check for common boot and file viruses from the 80's and 90's. Just a couple of days ago a user from another forum suspected that he has a virus in his old IBM PS/2 and sure he did had Junkie virus was able to remove it using my AV
Click to expand...
Just wondering.... have you seen indications of new DOS viruses? I don't know why everyone is fully focused on 80's and 90's viruses when it seems more likely to me that stuff you download over the Internet could be infected with stuff that someone wrote in the last year. There's no reason why not. Nobody is looking for new DOS viruses but all the tools and knowledge to create them are as readily available as ever, and the DOS community is more vulnerable than ever.
 
Just bought a couple of Genius ones--they carry various OEM brandings, but they're pretty good.
What I don't like are the "weighs so little that it'll be blown off your desktop by a stiff breeze" ones. I open them up and add weight.
 
Yea, I don't like those light mice either. My main machines use Red Dragon M601-3 USB gaming mice with adjustable weights in them.

m601-3.jpg
 
Xenophage said:
Just wondering.... have you seen indications of new DOS viruses? I don't know why everyone is fully focused on 80's and 90's viruses when it seems more likely to me that stuff you download over the Internet could be infected with stuff that someone wrote in the last year. There's no reason why not. Nobody is looking for new DOS viruses but all the tools and knowledge to create them are as readily available as ever, and the DOS community is more vulnerable than ever.
Click to expand...
the possibility of encountering new DOS viruses "in the wild" is slim. yes the knowledge is there but you would probably more likely to encounter or get win32 viruses, backdoors and trojans or worst ransomware from stuff you download from the net these days. however I have seen, DOS viruses (copies i got in the wild in my country years ago) not even detected by modern antiviruses, moreover some samples are detected by their last DOS version database updates as late as 2006-2009 (F-prot, kaspersky, mcafee, etc) before they stop updating or remove DOS support....
 
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