I like living maps: city-builders, resource management, production chains...but I think I'm out of patience with this problem. I can't move my mouse without the map going crazy. I have to be ridiculously careful and slow to keep it from wildly scrolling to the end of the map. It's like trying to look at a picture that someone keeps jerking all over the table.

Been playing games since Windows 95, and it's worse now than it's ever been. Imperialism, M2TW, are the worst-- getting around M2TW can be like trying to balance a marble on a globe. Whee! Apparently, the only solution is to damp your mouse way the heck down before opening the game. Which mostly works, I guess.

Old games need something like a hot key that kills the auto-scroll. If I could push Shift when I move the mouse, and the map would just HOLD STILL, that'd be great.

Master of Orion doesn't have this problem, by the way. It scrolls just like it did in DOS. So it might be possible to fix it in the rest of them.

Try putting drawing pins into your screen, see if that helps keep them still.

More sensibly, which game? Does it have the option to remove edge of screen scrolling (some do)

Medieval 2 Total War is pretty bad. I looked up answers on line and the "damp mouse before starting" seemed the only solution anyone had. Just noticing it now with Imperialism, the mouse is way over sensitive. Too much to be fun.

Thinking of Master of Orion, which actually didn't have auto-scroll. You click wherever on the screen you want to go, and it centers there. That's how you "scroll" that map: leave the mouse off-center and keep clicking til you're there.

That would be great. If they could replace auto-scroll with click-scroll. If they can't adjust it for (I'm guessing) the effect of faster processors on these poor old gummers.

Don't listen to this!

Ever since you convinced me to use Whiteout for typos I don't trust you!

If a game has hard wired edge scrolling in the code, there's not much you can do apart from limiting your mouse cursor to a point where it cant cross the boundary where the scrolling effect takes place. But there is usually an option to disable edge scrolling, I think.