Hi there,
Ooops. First posted using a private address not the list address. :(
Sorry all for the delay in replying - life intervened but I've now had
the chance to investigate this a little.
On Sun, 8 Sep 2024, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Actually, many reasonably new computers supported the following:
- boot from USB storage devices (flash sticks, SD cards in card readers, USB
zip, USB floppy, USB CD/DVD, harddisks, SSD etc.)
- use USB keyboards as if they were PS/2
- use USB mice as if they were PS/2
You may have to first configure the BIOS setup to tell it that you want to
boot in legacy (BIOS, not UEFI) mode and that you want USB legacy support.
The unreasonably old boxes which I'm using don't seem to support USB
keyboards but do boot from USB. My application has no use for a mouse.
Using one of these boxes I've found that booting FreeDOS from USB not
only allows a USB keyboard to function properly but also seems to let
me hotplug the keyboard reliably - even if FreeDOS is booted with no
keyboard connected. FWIW with the appropriate setup it also seems to
run my business software too (but I'm sure nobody cares about that:).
Much testing will be needed before it goes live at a customer site...
Having established this, I moved on to testing the Bret Johnson USB
drivers under MS-DOS. In case anyone is interested, loading the UHCI
host controller and keyboard drivers successfully enabled me to use
the USB keyboard on the same machine. I had to specify the interrupt
to be used by the host controller as otherwise (and in conflict with
the docs) it insisted on using IRQ 12, otherwise no apparent problems.
----
On Sun, 8 Sep 2024, Karen Lewellen via Freedos-user wrote:
... Does the computer you intend for this keyboard support USB at
the bios level?
No, see above.
... I use a fine USB dos driver. ...
Is this the one I mentioned above from Bret Johnson? That seems to
work for me, at least so far, but it's very early days.
May I personally applaud your dedication to solid DOS based business
practices!
No worries about ransomware with no network stack. :)
--
73,
Ged.
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