Hi, (this may be *slightly* off-topic, but I couldn't resist, sorry, I'm always wanting to share useless trivia)
EDIT: I'll just change the subject line, hopefully nobody will get (too) mad, then. On 7/6/11, Bret Johnson <bretj...@juno.com> wrote: > > There are a couple of problems with that approach. The first is that not > all keys on the keyboard end up in the BDA/keyboard buffer (Pause, > PrintScreen, SysReq, Left/Right Windows/GUI, Power/Sleep/Wakeup, multimedia > keys, etc.). If these keys are to be simulated, it must happen at the > scancode level, not the BDA level. The second problem is that some programs > provide their own INT 9 handler, and don't even use the BDA at all. For > these kinds of programs, the simulation must also happen at the scancode > level. All keyboards aren't all the same, though, which is why it's best not to hardcode key settings or use anything too obscure. My old 486 had a Macro key (available to use in SETEDIT via included TSR), my P166 had a Turbo key (typematic rate?), my laptop doesn't even have Pause/Break nor SysReq (does any DOS software use that???) nor numpad (natch, though some few laptops do). And of course that makes things like Ctrl-Break or Ctrl-Alt-SysReq-R-E-I-S-U-B impossible! ;-) Oh, and Eric (Auer) only buys 102-key keyboards (no Win or Menu keys, which most DOS apps ignore anyways except TDE). I think (old) XKEYB allowed for some user-defined stuff for those keys (0xE0 prefix???), but since XKEYB is deprecated, I guess it doesn't matter here. In short, I can't help but think of absurdly long key combos like Ctrl-Macro-Hyper-Super-Turbo-AltGr-GreyPlus-SysReq-F12-LShift-RCtrl. (EDIT: 11 keys! Both hands plus nose!) It makes me laugh, anyways. (Who uses RCtrl besides VirtualBox??? And RShift is pretty redundant, but a very very few use it, though I can't remember offhand, e.g. some obscure TSR.) P.S. QBASIC 1.0 has an easter egg if you press LCtrl-LAlt-LShift and RCtrl-RAlt-RShift really quickly before it fully loads (preferably on old machines!), then it will show the developers' names. P.P.S. MS-DOS, at bootup, IIRC it would skip config files with either F5 or even LShift (the latter of which is I guess similar to Win 3.x "don't load Startup"), which is different to other DOSes (including DR-DOS and of course FreeDOS). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
