keyboard through dos calls

[kerravon86]

Hi Japheth.

MSDOS 4.0 (at least) has a "ctty" command so that I
can do:

ctty com1:

to redirect input/output to a serial port.

Apparently blind people can't "see" (using their screen
readers) something that is running under Virtualbox, but
if the put:

mode com1: baud=9600 parity=n data=8 stop=1
ctty com1:

into their autoexec.bat, and then from the host system they do:

nc -c localhost (port number configured in virtualbox)

(or telnet, or putty or a real serial cable if they were accessing
a different physical computer)

then they should be able to see the screen.

Note that it was me that suggested ctty - this isn't existing
practice that someone told me about. But a real visually
impaired person did confirm that that should work.

Also note that I have seen students as recently as a few
years ago using MSDOS "debug" as part of their uni
coursework as it is a convenient entry into assembler.

I assume blind people could use qemu or bochs interpreters
to run MSDOS, and "see" that, but I didn't get confirmation
of that.

And the MSDOS command prompt works fine.

But if I attempt to run a Windows executable under HX, the
output does come to the serial port, but the input is coming
from the (virtual) machine's keyboard instead of the serial port.

Would it be possible - at least as an option - and as a default
would be good - to do a DOS call to retrieve the keystrokes,
so that the ctty status will be respected?

Thanks. Paul.

[Baron-von-Riedesel]

But if I attempt to run a Windows executable under HX, the output does come to the serial port, but the input is coming
from the (virtual) machine's keyboard instead of the serial port.

This is file access, a DOS thing. AFAICS, HX is not involved at all. Or do you have a (Win32) test case that shows how things are failing?

[kerravon86]

I am trying to run zcalc.exe and msvcrt.dll both of which can be found in c:\winpath on the image https://pdos.org/freewin.zip

Everything goes through HX.

Just type "zcalc"

The output appears on the netcat screen.

Go to the qemu machine and type 3+4

The answer appears on the netcat screen.

Hit enter on the qemu machine.

Output appears on the netcat screen.

Type "dir" on the netcat screen. Everything is working as expected (ie both input and output are coming from the netcat) again.

If you want me to place the executables here instead, I can do that.