12. Mouse Garrot

This section, and Mouse Garrot were written by Ed Sirett <ed@cityscape.co.uk> on 30 Jan 1995.

Mouse Garrot is an extension to the Linux Dos Emulator that tries to help the emulator give up CPU time to the rest of the Linux system.

It tries to detect the fact the the mouse is not doing anything and thus to release up CPU time, as is often the case when a mouse-aware program is standing idle, such programs are often executing a loop which is continually checking the mouse buttons & position.

Mouse Garrot is built directly into dosemu if and only if you are using the internal mouse driver of dosemu. All you have to do is make sure that the HOGTHRESHOLD value in the config file is non-zero.

If you are loading a (DOS based) mouse driver when you boot then you will also need to load MGARROT.COM It is essential that you load MGARROT.COM after you load the mouse driver. MGARROT will tell you if you are (a) running real DOS not dosemu, or (b) have requested a zero value for the HOGTHRESHOLD in the config file. In either case MGARROT fails to install and no memory will be lost. When MGARROT is installed it costs about 0.4k. MGARROT may loaded `high' if UMBs are available.

Mouse Garrot will work with many (maybe most) mouse-aware programs including Works, Dosshell and the Norton Commander. Unfortunately, there are some programs which get the mouse driver to call the program whenever the mouse moves or a button is pressed. Programs that work in this way are immune to the efforts of Mouse Garrot.