Hi. When I started programming in Turbo C 2.0 on my Commodore PC 5 (IBM PC XT compatible) with 20 MB hard disk and monochrome text monitor circa 1987, I didn't write any MSDOS or 8086-specific code at all. Everything I did was C90.
My code worked on the mainframe (MVS) too. I resisted making platform-specific code. There were some exceptions, but I don't think I ever made an MSDOS call, or ever included the non-C90 libraries like dos.h. Nor the Unix stuff like sys/types.h even when I was working on Unix systems. It was C90 all the way. This served me well, and the only fullscreen application I ever used (sort of) was microemacs. The only important thing I ever did was programming anyway (sort of). But there was always going to be a time where I had to get a fullscreen editor working portably, and I didn't think that was possible. I knew ANSI X3.64 existed, and I could activate it by putting ANSI.SYS in my config.sys, but that seemed to disappear in Windows, and I was always very confused, and on IBM mainframes it didn't remotely exist, and I was wondering why they didn't have a standard for keyboards either. Eventually the internet thing happened and eventually I ended up reading the wikipedia on ANSI X3.64 and I was surprised to find out that keyboards were in fact covered. I never knew why DOS only had ANSI for output, not input. I was also surprised to find the ANSI even allowed two escapes to be generated when you press ESC, so that you didn't need timing-sensitive code (which doesn't exist in C90). I was also surprised to find (just in the last month or something), that an older version of microemacs was public domain. Anyway, long story short - I have banged microemacs 3.6 into shape so that it is C90 compliant with the addition of ANSI escapes for both keyboard and screen, allowing it to run on both PDOS/386 and z/PDOS (mainframes) with the only difference being in handling EBCDIC vs ASCII. ie other than that, all the C source code (when doing the ANSI + C90 target) is completely identical. PDOS/86 was added with the simple addition of a makefile. And thanks to assistance already received here, I got the exact same DOS executable to run under Freedos. It does require this to be installed: http://www.sweger.com/ansiplus/AnsiPlus.html E:\>grep -i ansi config.sys config.sys: device=C:\ANSIPLUS\ANSIPLUS.exe E:\>grep -i ansi autoexec.bat autoexec.bat: path c:\freedos\bin;c:\hx\bin;c:\winpath;d:\dos;d:\;c:\dospath;c:\watcom\binnt;c:\watcom\binw;c:\ansiplus E:\>grep -i setaplus autoexec.bat autoexec.bat: setaplus loadkeys pdoskeys.cfg E:\>type pdoskeys.cfg 27,27,27 0,72,27,"[A" 0,80,27,"[B" 0,77,27,"[C" 0,75,27,"[D" E:\> Since I only run the one fullscreen app, I thought I wouldn't be affected by reassigning the cursor keys. However, it turns out that there was something I was using - freecom! So now I can't do command recall. If you would like to get hold of this, I have uploaded a new UC8086 to http://pdos.org There is an me.exe and c:\devel\memacs I was thinking that maybe the freecom folk would like to add ANSI escapes as an option. How else can you handle when the ctty or whatever the DOS command is to redirect input to a com port? If you attach a VT100, you will need to handle the ANSI escapes. HX apparently does direct hardware manipulation to get to the keyboard, so that would need to be independently enhanced to allow ANSI escapes (and note that there is a specific Windows call, introduced in Win 10, to activate ANSI). Note that I have a different goal to most people. Most people want to run DOS-era software. I want to redefine the DOS era now that the "rush to market" is long over. Any thoughts? Thanks. Paul.
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