Hi, I have finally found the time to solder a printer cable and some buttons to a 20x4 text LCD display which I bought more than 2 years ago... Works nice with lcdproc / LCDd in Linux, but more interesting: I wrote a small DOS driver for it, which is similar user-interface-wise to BrlTTY (a Linux Braille driver). The temporary download location is:
http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/tapdos.zip (3k zip / NASM / binary < 1k) Current features: Loads as a TSR and assumes 80x25 color text mode. Ignores character colors, cursor location and non-ASCII chars (the LCD supports ASCII 0x20-0x7f and 0xe0-0xff, the rest is either unused, filled with Japanese glyphs, or with user-defineable glyphs (eight, in 5x7 matrix), the latter showing up at 2 places in the charset). Ignores actual screen size, too... Uhm, well there ARE features: ;-) You can use the buttons connected to the LCD to do: - move around the LCD position on the screen (some part of the screen is copied to the LCD 9 times per second, and you can select which part by using the navigation buttons) - toggle LCD updates (i.e. freeze the LCD display to have more time to read) - move the LCD position to the screen upper left - move the LCD position to the left in steps of 20 chars, wrapping to the line above when wrapping from left to right position - move the LCD position to the right in steps of 20 chars... Quite small TSR, quite simple functionality, but seems to be actually useful :-). Apart from the missing features waiting to be implemented (which I can do myself), would anybody want to port some I/O protocols from BrlTTY and write "Braille versions of tapdos" that way? USB Braille displays will not work, and BrlTTY drivers which call speech engines will not work either (BrlTTY is for multitasking operating systems, you guessed it). But quite a few Braille displays simply use some kind of serial or parallel port protocol. Alas, you often have to do the font rendering yourself (i.e. send 8 Braille pixels per char, instead of sending an ASCII value). Thanks! Feel free to spread the word about the DOS / Braille "project". Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5047&alloc_id=10808&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
