Berserk mouse!

[Thompson]

I'm having problems with my mouse in CM. The mouse just

goes completely crazy - the pointer jumps all over the

place and acts as if I'd been pressing left and right

buttons randomly (etc). I can ALT + F4 to Windows but the

problem then persists in Win as well. The only solution

is to reboot. In this mess, mousewheel also stopped working

in Windows (which now says I have a basic MS mouse w/o the

wheel). Go figure!

I've tried reinstalling my mouse but that does not help.

This problem started suddenly about a week ago, before

that I had no problems with CM. Help me, I'm going into

serious CM withdrawal!

My rig:

AMD Athlon 650Mhz, 256MB, Abit KA7 motherboard,

GeForce256, Soundblaster Live! 1024, PS/2 Intellimouse.

Windows 98SE with DirectX8.0a, CM is v1.12.

(BTW, I'm using default WIN98 mouse drivers)

:confused:

[Schrullenhaft]

Do you have this problem only in CM ? In other words when you boot your mouse is fine until you launch CM and then everything goes haywire ? Is the problem immediate within CM or does it happen only once you get to the 3D portion ?

My Microsoft Intellimouse 1.1A is setup within Windows 98SE as a 'PS/2 Compatible Mouse Port' with the MS Intellimouse Wheel software installed (and configurable via the Mouse control panel).

What GeForce drivers do you have installed ? Is your sound or video card sharing an IRQ with anything else ?

[Thompson]

The problem starts in the 3D portion of the game, everything is fine until then. I reinstalled the game and everything seemed fine until I loaded a saved game from the old install - then the mouse went immediately berserk again!

Come to think of it, I once had a similar problem in some other game (can't remember which, it was about a year ago), but the glitch went away on its own.

This problem only surfaces in CM, however, I haven't tested it with many other games yet. You see CM is (was) the only game I played. Have to check this out. Also, as I'm at work at the moment (hard at work ), I can't tell you what Nvidia drivers I have or my IRQs offhand. I'll get back to you.

Anyway, thank you already, Schrullenhaft.

[Thompson]

OK, so my Nvidia drivers are v21.81 and the mouse is at IRQ 12 alone (i.e. not sharing it) listed as "PS/2 compatible mouseport." Graphics card is at IRQ 11 and soundcard at IRQ 10 both sharing that IRQ with "ACPI IRQ reservation for PCI IRQ control" (free translation as I run a Finnish Win98SE).

I quess this is a motherboard problem as I've been searching the 'net for solutions and it seems my Abit KA7 BIOS may be the culprit. However, I've never done anything to BIOS and upgrading it sounds dicey. Anyhow, your advice is most welcome.

[Schrullenhaft]

Your mouse driver sounds fine in general and I wouldn't exactly think it is the cause of your problems. If need be, you can uninstall all of the software that you have for it and possibly remove the device and then have Windows redetect it. What mousewheel software are you using and do you have the latest version ?

The listing of "ACPI IRQ Reservation for PCI IRQ Control" is normal and should accompany every PCI and AGP device in your system (since ACPI is controlling how the IRQs are managed) - otherwise it would say "IRQ Holder for PCI Steering" in a standard Plug and Play setup. ACPI can sometimes be problematic however, but it appears that it has configured your system to use different IRQs for your PCI and AGP cards. I'm not sure how it is determined whether PCI & AGP devices will all share one IRQ or be configured otherwise. It may be that Windows 2000 & XP will usually push all PCI & AGP devices onto one IRQ (which can cause problems with some device drivers), while Windows 9x/ME may vary the scheme a little and not always push the devices to a single IRQ.

BIOS upgrades usually aren't too much of a problem. There are times when something can go wrong and cause you a lot of grief, but a boot up with a clean diskette and then flashing the BIOS usually works fine. Some BIOS upgrades can fix ACPI issues, hard drive compatibility issues, video card compatibility issues, increase the number of CPUs recognized, etc. ABIT is usually fairly good at documenting the changes in each of their BIOS's, so it may be worth a look. Though I don't know if a BIOS upgrade is really going to address your problems or not.