Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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Windows initializes the mouse driver by calling the driver's initialization
routine, and subsequently calling the driver's Enable function. The
initialization routine determines whether a mouse exists and whether an
MS-DOS mouse driver is present. If the initialization routine returns a
nonzero value, Windows assumes the mouse is present and calls the Inquire
function to retrieve information about the mouse hardware. This function
returns the mouse information in the form of a MOUSEINFO structure.
 
Windows calls the Enable function when it is ready to receive mouse input.
The Enable function installs the mouse-interrupt handler, replacing any
existing interrupt handler. Once installed, the handler retrieves the mouse
motion and button status and passes this information to Windows through a
mouse-event callback function. Windows passes the address of the mouse-event
callback function to the driver when it calls Enable. The driver must save
the callback function address and use it whenever it has mouse input to send
to Windows.
 
Windows calls the Disable function to remove the mouse-interrupt handler and
restore any previous handler. This occurs whenever the user switches to a
non-Windows application or when Windows quits. Windows calls Enable to
reinstall the interrupt handler when the user eventually switches back to
Windows.
 
The mouse driver includes the MouseGetIntVect function that Windows or
utilities can call to determine which interrupt vector the mouse hardware is
using.
 
 
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