Bret,Your points are important for a serious screen reader, because the commands to access speech, read the current line or sections of the screen, etc., incorporate those modifier keys. That is done so the screen reader works in harmony with the system, real ms dos in this case. My question for you is if running ms dos from your hard drive in this way gives you access, or would give you access to the machine's actual hardware? i run Ms. Dos, but as the only system on my computer. Meaning my hardware synthesizer attached to my physical serial port works just fine.
Same for the external USB drive attached to my physical USB port. Would that also happen using ms DOS in a virtual environment? Karen
On Mon, 16 Mar 2020, Bret Johnson wrote:
I'm not sure if it will end up being relevant to this discussion or not, but I use VMWare version 14 under Windows 10 to create a virtual machine for DOS. I prefer MS-DOS to FreeDOS for various reasons, though I do use some of the FreeDOS utilities. I actually have the machine set up to dual-boot, where I can either boot Windows 10 or boot directly to "real" DOS. Virtual machines are nice for some things, but they are far from a panacea. The main reason I like VMWare is that it allows you to use a real partition on the hard drive as one of the disks in the DOS virtual machine. You are not limited to "software hard drives" like you are in most other VM's. That is, whatever I do to the hard drive in the DOS VM (or even directly from Windows) automatically shows up when I boot to real DOS and vice versa. I don't need to do any FTP'ing or creating new ISO's or even remembering what I need to change the next time I boot up to keep my real DOS and my Virtual DOS synchronized. The ability to access a real hard drive (or partition) from inside the DOS VM is the part of VMWare that I really like. The part I really dislike is that it does a VERY bad job of handling the keyboard. Inside the DOS VM the modifier keys (Shift, Control, Alt) are constantly getting "stuck" and the keyboard releases for some reason are not always correctly sent to the VM. I'm constantly needing to press the modifier keys in the middle of my VM sessions so the key releases are recognized like they're supposed to be. For that reason, I don't use the VMWare Virtual DOS for any serious work since it's a real PITA to use the keyboard. I do know that DOSBox will also let you access real partitions, but almost none of the DOS programs I use work properly in DOSBox. DOSBox is FAR from being a "real" DOS environment and is very limited in what you can do with it.
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