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ANSI escapes for input (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 24.07.2023, 15:18

> I'm confused by this question.
>
> Terminals needed a way to send codes for special keys over the wire. DOS
> computers were supposed to use the DOS keyboard interrupt to read
> keystrokes, or the lower-level BIOS interrupt routines. For special keys
> you have to use the BIOS routines, as DOS will just return ASCII codes.
>
> When acting like a terminal, sure, those keystrokes have to be translated
> to whatever ASCII codes the host is expecting. But for local processing it
> doesn't make sense.
>
> What are you trying to accomplish?
Actually I was confused by your question! :-)

But I think I have figured it out - but not really.

First - I already have what I want with both PDOS/86 and PDOS/386 - applications expect to receive escape sequences for input, and PDOS delivers them.

And Windows 10+ supports this too. And I have written such Windows applications. And those ANSI-input-applications work under PDOS/386. And now I would like them to work under Freedos+HX.

But - and this is what confuses me - even if I was using just MSDOS alone, surely a PDOS/86 (semi-clone of MSDOS) application (expecting escape sequences), would work under MSDOS too, so long as the ANSIKEYBOARD.SYS or whatever existed? Because that driver would convert BIOS keys into escape sequences, and so long as genuine MSDOS doesn't interfere with the input flow, it my PDOS/86 applications will suddenly become "odd MSDOS applications", right?

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