DOS ain't dead

International keyboard support (Developers)

posted by tom , Germany (West), 22.01.2023, 18:06
(edited by tom on 22.01.2023, 19:51)

> I'm working on enabling some of my programs for Unicode.
>...
>
> On the keyboard side there is the KEYB.COM program. From what I can tell
> when you use KEYB it just fixes or replaces the standard BIOS handling,
> converting scan codes to something different from the default. It also
> allows for some shift/meta type operations to generate additional
> characters. But ultimately, the output is still going to be a value from 0
> to 255 representing a character, and hopefully the matching code page for
> the video display is resident. Otherwise, you get the correct character
> but an incorrect display.
>
> Does this sound about right?

that sounds mostly right.

however, there used to be a thing called DBCS (double-byte character support?) that was somehow used to support languages with more than 256 characters like Chinese. however, as a (german) European I'm only used to languages with much less than 256 letters. It would be cool to have a Chinese/Japanese (or similar) developer explain how this worked - in the context of DOS and how MSDOS helped support this.

of course, a DOS application like the editor Blocek can find a way to input and output DBCS all on its own...

Complete thread:

• International keyboard support - mbbrutman, 21.01.2023, 21:44
  • International keyboard support - marcov, 22.01.2023, 14:19
  • International keyboard support - tom, 22.01.2023, 18:06
  • International keyboard support - Laaca, 22.01.2023, 21:55
    • International keyboard support - mbbrutman, 22.01.2023, 22:46
      • International keyboard support - Laaca, 23.01.2023, 00:20
      • International keyboard support - bretjohn, 23.01.2023, 18:12
        • International keyboard support - mbbrutman, 23.01.2023, 23:51
          • International keyboard support - bretjohn, 24.01.2023, 21:10
        • International keyboard support - tom, 12.02.2023, 18:39
          • International keyboard support - bretjohn, 13.02.2023, 15:35
            • International keyboard support - tom, 13.02.2023, 18:36
              • International keyboard support - bretjohn, 14.02.2023, 04:51
            • International keyboard support - tkchia, 13.02.2023, 20:13
              • International keyboard support - bretjohn, 14.02.2023, 05:05
      • International keyboard support - tom, 14.02.2023, 12:17
        • International keyboard support - tom, 15.02.2023, 13:19
          • International keyboard support - marcov, 15.02.2023, 18:14
            • International keyboard support - tom, 15.02.2023, 21:31
              • International keyboard support - mbbrutman, 18.02.2023, 03:17
                • International keyboard support - Aitor, 06.03.2023, 01:09