This is a mouse driver for Windows 3.x with VirtualBox mouse integration support.

I have tested it with Windows 3.0 in real and 386 enhanced modes, Windows 3.11 in 386 enhanced mode with paging on, as well as Windows 95 (Windows 9x can use 16-bit mouse drivers).

Note: if you also use DOS programs, you may be more interested in my other approach: VBADOS, a DOS mouse driver and a stub driver for 3.x which calls into the DOS driver. It has more features and works with VMware, however VBADOS is a more complicated design so I'm leaving this older approach here for reference.

Install

Download vbmouse.flp (a floppy image containing vbmouse.drv and related .inf files) and insert it into your virtual machine.

Windows 3.x

In the Windows Setup program (accessible either via SETUP.EXE on an installed Windows or via the corresponding icon in Program Manager), go to Options → Change system configuration → Mouse → Select "Other mouse..." → Search in "A:" → "VirtualBox PS/2 Mouse". Select the "VirtualBox PS/2 Mouse" in the Mouse section again.

Alternatively, you can copy vbmouse.drv to your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory and edit WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI mouse.drv line to point to it, e.g.

[boot]
mouse.drv = vbmouse.drv

Windows 95

Right-click on the included 9xsetup.inf file and select Install. Then reboot.

Alternatively, you might also edit WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI as in the above section. The .inf file just automates that.

Building

This requires OpenWatcom 2.0, albeit it may work with an older version, and was only tested on a Linux host.

The included makefile is a wmake makefile. To build it just enter the OpenWatcom environment and run wmake vbmouse.drv. wmake flp may be used to build a floppy image containg oemsetup.inf and vbmouse.drv for easier installation.

Design

This is at its core a driver for a plain PS/2 mouse driver, using the PS/2 BIOS. If running outside VirtualBox, in fact it will behave like a PS/2 mouse driver. However, it removes a lot of checks for older platforms and is mostly written in C rather than assembly, so hopefully it is easier to understand than the Windows sample drivers.

The VirtualBox guest integrations present itself as a PCI device to the guest. Thanks to the BIOS, the device is already pre-configured. The driver uses the real-mode PCI BIOS to request the current configuration of this PCI device. To communicate with the host, the guest must send the PCI device the (physical) address of a buffer containing commands to be sent to the host. The host will write back the response in the same buffer. Further details are available in OSDev.

The only challenge here is getting the physical address (what the VirtualBox PCI device expects) corresponding to a logical address (segment:offset) as seen from inside Windows. In real mode Windows, the segment can be converted to a physical address without difficulty. In 386 enhanced mode, the segment is actually a selector, but turns out one can obtain the base of a selector with the GetSelectorBase() WINAPI. However, if paging is enabled, that only computes the linear address, which is still not the same as the physical address. In this case, the Virtual DMA services are used to obtain the physical address, even though we are not doing DMA.

When VirtualBox is told that the guest wants absolute mouse information, VirtualBox will stop sending relative mouse information via the PS/2 mouse. However, the PS/2 controller will still send interrupts whenever mouse motion happens, and it will still report mouse button presses. In fact, the only way to obtain mouse button presses is still through the PS/2 controller. Thus, the only difference between this driver and a standard PS/2 mouse driver is that, when an interrupt from the mouse comes in, we won't report the relative mouse motion to Windows. Rather, we call into VirtualBox (right from the PS/2 BIOS interrupt handler) to obtain the absolution mouse position, and report that to Windows.