Hallo Herr Bernd Böckmann via Freedos-devel,
am Montag, 14. April 2025 um 12:18 schrieben Sie:
> Hi,
> we (Willi Spiegl) have a machine, where depending on the the FreeDOS boot
> menu selection, keys on his german keyboard like {}[] are not recognized.
> I remotely narrowed this down to the extended keyboard flag at 0040:0096
> getting cleared (to me randomly). Normally for Willis machine, the byte at
> 0040:0096 contains value 10h, indicating the extended keyboard being present.
> Recent mKeyb versions make use of this flag [1]. Loading mKeyb with parameter
> /E indeed fixes the problem.
> However, right after the kernel is loaded and the boot menu option was
> chosen, even before the first device driver is being loaded, the byte at
> 0040:0096 is set to zero depending on the boot option (is set to zero if boot
> option 3 is chosen), making mKeyb auto detection fail. Willi put as first
> device a test program [2] of mine indicating whether the extended flag is set.
> I have no explanation why the byte at 0040:0096 gets changed. In the kernel
> source I found no obvious place where this byte gets written (and see no
> reason why it should).
You are saying that this depends on the menu option being 3, independent of the
effect of this option?
It's always a clever thing to post CONFIG.SYS itself, rather then a description
of it (in germany there is a game
"Stille Post") :-<
> It's hard for me to debug this without the machine being at my hands.
> Anyone with a clever idea how Willi may narrow this down further?
we recently had a similar (in the sense of unexplainable) problem.
The suggested solution was "if the platform doesn't support DOS, drop the
platform".
It was easy because everybody hates VMWARE.
In the current case, the suggested solution is "write a device driver that sets
0040:0096" so you can avoid /E.
Or send in the machine (which he probably won't do).
Tom
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