Cutemouse is the standard mouse driver for FreeDOS. The program name is CTMOUSE.
On a dedicated PC, you’ll need a compatible mouse and the Cutemouse driver. Cutemouse is a DOS based, open source mouse driver, which supports many protocols of serial and PS/2 mice. It can search for a serial mouse at all COM ports or only at a specified port. An important Cutemouse feature is its small memory footprint: the resident part (TSR) occupies less than 3.5K. Cutemouse can also install itself in upper memory, when available, without requiring external utilities such as the LH (LoadHigh) command.
CTMOUSE supports standard Mouse Systems, Microsoft and Logitech serial and PS/2 protocols. Also supported are mice with wheel. By default, when searching for a connected mouse, the PS/2 port is checked first, then all COM ports are scanned. This makes it easy to install. For most mice, just add this to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
C:\CTMOUSE\CTMOUSE
This assumes that the Cutemouse driver was installed in the C:\CTMOUSE directory.
There are other options to Cutemouse to specify certain mice, or to disable certain features. If you have problems loading the mouse driver, check the documentation that came with your version of Cutemouse.
If you want to play a different game that doesn’t require a mouse, you can unload Cutemouse from memory. Option /U in command line can be used to unload the resident part of the driver unless the interrupts have been intercepted by another program:
C:\CTMOUSE\CTMOUSE /U
After successful unloading, it restores mouse services that were present at installation time.
Inside a DOS emulator, things are a little easier. Most emulators will provide the mouse driver by default. Check if yours does. If it does not, try using Cutemouse.