INT14 waiting for character

INT14 waiting for character

[Donald Arseneau]

Hello,

Attempting to run an old program under dosemu, I and collegues 
have run afoul of the INT14 emulation, specifically:

  These routines are not flawless since it does not wait 
  for a character during receive, and this may confuse some 
  programs.

Is there any hope of getting a version of INT14 that waits for
a character?  Either by patching the current code, or by using
a different IO support library?  I think something that did 
high-level access to the linux port would work fine for us.

If there is some known fix for this, I would love to hear it.
If is not, then I could help with improving it; not that I know
anything on the topic, but I migght be able to scrounge some help.

(Is Mark Rejhon still involved?)


Donald Arseneau                          asnd@triumf.ca

Re: INT14 waiting for character

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Donald Arseneau wrote:
> Is there any hope of getting a version of INT14 that waits for
> a character?
Doing this is practically trivial.
You have to rewrite that subfunction
(ah=2) in asm and put it into bios.S,
since it is not possible to do a
waiting poll inside dosemu itself.
The rest of int14 will stay where
it is now, only the polling part
must go into bios.S.
We already have such a thing for the
keyboard handling (the polling part
is in bios.S, rest is in int16.c),
so you have a place where to take a
look.

> (Is Mark Rejhon still involved?)
No, but the serial code still gets
some attention nevertheless (depends
on what dosemu version you are using
however).

Re: INT14 waiting for character

[Donald Arseneau]

Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru> writes:

> Donald Arseneau wrote:
> > Is there any hope of getting a version of INT14 that waits for
> > a character?

> Doing this is practically trivial.
> You have to rewrite that subfunction
> (ah=2) in asm and put it into bios.S,

That is good to hear!  Unfortunately, while what you say rings true
(I could find the keyboard wait in bios.S) doing anything about it 
is vastly non-trivial to me.  Isn't this (wait for character on
serial port) required for lots of DOS programs?  Is anyone with
knowledge of the internals interested in implementing it? I hope
so.



Donald Arseneau                          asnd@triumf.ca

Re: INT14 waiting for character

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Donald Arseneau wrote:
> Unfortunately, while what you say rings true
> (I could find the keyboard wait in bios.S) doing anything about it 
> is vastly non-trivial to me.
Please have a look into a rombios.c
of the Bochs. That subfunction is
14 lines of a C code only and is
absolutely straight-forward (although
you'll have to do it in asm).

> Isn't this (wait for character on
> serial port) required for lots of DOS programs?
No idea, but I have none of those for
example. The programs I have, are either
using fossil, or the direct access. int14
have too many limitations so it is not
in a wide usage I think.

> Is anyone with
> knowledge of the internals interested in implementing it? I hope
> so.
At least you can try to motivate them.
Submit an RFE on SF, attach the example
program that uses that functionality (and
therefore doesn't work under dosemu) etc.
I don't think developers will be motivated
to do that without you trying hard to
motivate them, but who knows:)