Mouse Cursor on Wrong Monitor During Dual-Monitor Debugging

ID Number: Q65528

3.00 3.10 3.11 3.14

MS-DOS

Summary:

Under certain conditions, when invoking real-mode CodeView (CV) in

dual-monitor mode with /2, the mouse cursor appears on the wrong

monitor. When this occurs, a "sprite" mouse cursor appears on the

monitor that the application is to run on, while the secondary monitor

where CodeView is running does not have a mouse cursor. Several

workarounds to this problem are given below.

More Information:

The sprite mouse cursor is a "graphic" arrow cursor similar to that in

Windows 3.0 or OS/2 Presentation Manager (PM), as opposed to the

traditional "text" block cursor that usually appears when running

CodeView or the Programmer's WorkBench (PWB).

The problem of the mouse appearing on the wrong monitor occurs only on

computers that have "extended register" video boards, such as some of

the Video 7 VGA cards. Certain mouse drivers enable the sprite cursor

when they detect these extended video registers. Because a monochrome

monitor cannot support this extended mode mouse cursor, the cursor

fails to switch to the secondary monitor when focus is switched to

that monitor after CodeView is invoked with the /2 switch.

The following are three possible workarounds to this problem:

1. Upgrade to mouse driver version 7.04 or later. This version

provides a new switch, /Y, which can be used with either the

MOUSE.COM program or the MOUSE.SYS device driver. The /Y switch

tells the mouse driver to disable the sprite cursor. The mouse

driver update can be obtained free of charge by contacting

Microsoft Product Support Services.

2. If a mouse driver earlier than version 7.04 is used, the problem

may be worked around by creating a batch file or adding the

following commands to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

mode mono

mouse

mode co80

These commands will switch focus to the monochrome monitor while

the mouse is being invoked and then will switch the focus back to

the color monitor. This method will prevent the mouse driver from

detecting the extended registers and using the sprite cursor.

3. Disable the extended video registers. Check the video card

documentation to see if this method is possible with your

particular card.