Anyone know of any DOS apps that can be used to capture mouse axes input and remap them to other functions, such as keyboard buttons?

The reason I ask is that I've been playing around with some old FPS games in DOSBox and I'm trying to get a better control scheme with mouselook and such. I know of Windows based applications such as GlovePIE but I'm trying to get a solution that works purely within DOSBox as I can then make it fully portable.

AutoHotKey? You may need to do a bit of setting up for it, but it should be able to capture "MouseX+" or equivalent and translate it to "PageUP". Might be mistaken though.

Yeah, I've seen AutoHotKey but it's a Windows application.

That said, though, if it can be run as a standalone executable that calls a given script file (i.e. doesn't require installation so acts like a Terminate Stay Resident program) then that could be a possibility as I could use a batch script to run it with said script then kick off DOSBox and autoload the game, then on exiting DOSBox the batch script finishes off by quitting the AutoHotKey and exiting. No idea if AutoHotKey can be run this way though.

Autohotkey runs and appears in your taskbar, and you load some scripts in it. You can add a window name/id/title/executable as the active part of the script, and have the script do the change. So for example you can have "If Window.Title == Photoshop; MouseWheelUp == PageUp" "If Window.Title == Firefox; MouseWheelUp == Ctrl-+".
Can't really recall the exact scripting, and it isn't the most user friendly language, but it should be possible, assuming it can capture mouse movement, which I'm not really sure (though there is at least one mouse gesturing script as example in the site).
P.S. It is also possible that the FPS you wish to play has a modification to allow mouselook for it, so it could help if you also post which games you are trying to play.

Thanks for the info. I'll check out the documentation to see if there is anything about mouse axes. I did spot that AutoHotKey can create standalone executables too so that could be promising.

As for the game in question, it definitely doesn't have mouselook and I have seen some users solve it by using GlovePIE but I'm after a more portable solution. The game is Dark Forces. :) Been a long time since I last played it and I now have it running quite well in DOSBox, I just want a more modern control scheme.

:) I've been following the XLEngine for quite some months, waiting for DarkXL to get into beta where it is promised to be fully completable. It is very slow to progress, however. I'm also waiting for BloodXL too as even though I have Blood (from GOG) running quite nicely, it suffers from the difficulty damage bug when loading a save game.

I may have a solution - Mouse Raider. http://mouseraider.homepage.t-online.de/

It isn't a DOS program, it is a Windows one, but a portable one at that, it seems, as it just extracts from an archive and is a standalone executable that writes the settings to a config file stored alongside the executable.

I've managed to use it to get mouselook working with Dark Forces. The rest of the keyboard remapping can be done within the DOSBox keymapper tool.

Now I just need to see if I can get a batch file set up to get it all running.

UPDATE: Well, Mouse Raider works. To a point. Mouselook is fine, as is getting alternate fire onto the right mouse button (yes, Dark Forces doesn't allow this natively!). However, when mapping cycle weapons up and down to the mouse wheel, sometimes it works, sometimes it cycles twice with one click, so that's not very good. Also, I can't get it to execute via a batch script as it doesn't work when using the START command, so if it does launch it prevents the DOSBox.exe being called by that script. But it is still an improvement because of mouselook.

Well, after much playing I now have my solution (until the XLEngine is finished, anyway). It turns out that GlovePIE is itself portable as it doesn't have to be installed and saves settings in script files.

It is also possible to call the GlovePIE executable from a batch file that loads a specified GlovePIE script file and launches a given file. My batch file is below:

.\\GlovePIE\PIEFree.exe -.\\GlovePIE\DFMouse /r:".\\Dark Forces.bat"

So the relative paths work fine (for portability), DFMouse is the GlovePIE script and Dark Forces.bat is my batch file for running Dark Forces in a portable DOSBox.

Plus the scrollwheel clicks are picked up as single button presses unlike my attempt with Mouse Raider. So, GlovePIE does everything I need.

The only untidy parts are that it gives a UAC prompt when being run and it doesn't close down automatically once the game has been quit, but these are so minor that they really don't matter.