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alintz

12 Posts

Posted - 17 Jan 2005 :  08:02:49  Show Profile  Email Poster
Is there a way to load custom mouse pointer graphics in Win CE? The default arrow is too small and easily lost on our display. We currently use Win CE 4.20 on a BitsyX board and have applications in eVC+ 4.0 and VB.net.

alintz

12 Posts

Posted - 17 Jan 2005 :  09:53:48  Show Profile  Email Poster
Clarification: What we really need is a larger, more colorful pointer at the system level, not the application level so the users can find it no matter what they are doing.

Another related problem is that mouse pointer seems to get hidden
under other icons during some redraws and does not remain 'on top' as it should. Has anyone else seen these type of problems, and is there anything that can be done about it? (No matter how big the cursor is, the user won't find it if its not on top.)
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t0671dl

27 Posts

Posted - 17 Jan 2005 :  15:13:02  Show Profile  Email Poster
The cursor sprite, not being a hardware supported graphical sprite, disappears when any running application writes to the same screen location that the sprite occupies. Only when an mouse interrupt occurs does the mouse cursor reappear. Applications that have high frame update rates ( I am doing full screen blts at 10 Hz ) never gives the chance for the cursor to repaint.

I'm wonderring if it might be possible to force a cursor redraw using a timer interrupt, maybe at 10Hz?
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kurtwl

28 Posts

Posted - 10 Feb 2005 :  06:52:47  Show Profile  Email Poster
Calling SetCursorPos with the point from GetCursorPos from within a thread does at least keep the mouse cursor visible.
This does not seem like a proper solution to the problem.

It also does not address the issue of making the mouse cursor larger at a system level.

Is there no other way to tame the mouse beastie within CE?
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akidder

1519 Posts

Posted - 10 Feb 2005 :  09:26:35  Show Profile  Email Poster
The mouse cursor is, indeed, a bit of a beastie in CE 4.2. It sometimes appears when you don't want it (e.g. an hourglass when system is working) and isn't visible at other times (e.g. if not moved when a new window is drawn).

The heart of the issue, as t0671dl notes above, is that the LCD controller on the PXA255 doesn't support a hardware ("sprite") cursor. This means that the CE display driver has to redraw the mouse pointer "by hand" on a regular basis.

We've been investigating PXA255 mouse cursor issues on a number of fronts in recent months, but its control has proven to be elusive. CE 4.2 doesn't make mouse cursor control easy, and CE 5 doesn't look much better. We will post what we find when we get to the bottom of the issue.

For now, we recommend following the workarounds cited in this thread.
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akidder

1519 Posts

Posted - 03 Mar 2005 :  19:05:22  Show Profile  Email Poster
More detail about the hourglass and mouse cursors in CE 4.2 and 5.0 is posted at topic 1844.
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