Keep the system mouse cursor visible while a mouse-emulation profile is active (HTPC / controller-as-mouse)

[DevFreezing]

Use case

I run my PC connected to a TV and use a DualSense as a mouse to navigate
Windows and launch games from the couch (left stick = cursor, Cross = left
click, Circle = right click). DS4Windows handles this really well and it's the
main reason I use it on this machine.

Problem

Windows hides the system cursor when no physical mouse is present / until a real
mouse moves. When I drive the cursor purely with the controller, the pointer is
invisible even though hover and clicks work normally — icons highlight, clicks
register, there's just no visible pointer. That makes a controller-as-mouse
setup hard to use.

The only workaround I've found is setting EnableCursorSuppression = 0 (DWORD)
under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and
rebooting. That's a global, manual registry change that's awkward to recommend
to less technical users.

Request

When a profile with mouse emulation becomes active (or the moment the
mouse-emulation stick first produces movement), DS4Windows could force the
system cursor to show.

Thanks for reviving the project.

[hbashton]

Sure. This isn’t an issue when you have a connected mouse, so I could theoretically just add a toggle to enable a virtual mouse when the checkbox is selected. I’ll move this to in progress, and add it in the future

[hbashton]

DS4Windows_2026.06.08-ci-3bed4a4_x64.zip

Please try this and verify it has fixed your issue

[hbashton]

I am going to close this issue if there is no update. Did this fix your issue?

[DevFreezing]

Hi @hbashton, thanks a lot for the quick turnaround! I haven't had a chance to test the CI build yet — I'll try it on my HTPC this weekend and report back. Please keep the issue open until then if possible. Thanks!

[DevFreezing]

Hi @hbashton, I got around to testing the CI build. Quick report:

• I first reverted my workaround (set EnableCursorSuppression back to default and rebooted) and confirmed the invisible-cursor bug reappears, so I was testing a clean baseline.
• Ran the build in portable mode. I couldn't find any new option/checkbox related to the virtual mouse or cursor visibility in the profile config — am I looking in the wrong place, or does it need enabling somewhere specific?
• With the controller driving the cursor, the pointer is still invisible (hover/clicks work as before), so the fix doesn't resolve it on my setup.

One environment detail that might be relevant: my mouse and keyboard are connected through a USB-over-Ethernet hub, and the BIOS reports "no keyboard found" (though I can enter BIOS fine). I suspect Windows may not be treating these as standard HID pointing devices, which could be why cursor suppression triggers in the first place — and possibly why the virtual mouse device isn't registering as expected. Happy to grab any logs or test a debug build if that helps.

[DevFreezing]

Quick correction to my last comment: I looked into the "USB-over-Ethernet" detail and it's actually a transparent point-to-point USB 2.0 extender (TX/RX over a single Cat cable, no driver/software), so Windows sees my mouse and keyboard as standard HID devices. So that's almost certainly a red herring — the BIOS "no keyboard found" is just an enumeration-timing quirk of the extender, not Windows treating the devices as non-standard.

So the situation is simply the generic mouse-emulation cursor suppression: the pointer is invisible when driven by the controller with no physical mouse moving, exactly as in the original report. My environment shouldn't be a special case. Main open question stands — where should the new virtual-mouse option appear in the profile config? I couldn't find it in the CI build (portable mode).