Controlling a DOS PC without keyboard \ VOGONS

Controlling a DOS PC without keyboard

Topic actions

First post, by SuperHanSolo

Posted on 2016-03-22, 19:58

SuperHanSolo Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 46
Joined: 2016-02-25, 14:48
Location: South Africa

I have been wanting to turn one of my DOS PCs to an old school MS-DOS gaming console.
I can connect it to a small TV with VGA and line out (PC speaker routed through the sound card for games without soundblaster support), then ill create a DOS batch selection menu to chose the game (i did it before, cant remember but i know it works).

In the selection menu ill have all the games listed, but the problem is ill only be able to select the options using a keyboard, it would be nice if i could somehow do it with a controller but that would require the gameport and controller driver to be run before the menu and even then im not sure if it would be possible to do anything with it outside of a game that has joystick support.

As a second option i could use a small wireless keyboard, but most are USB and im not aware of of an option available that will work on a old DOS PC.

Any suggestion or maybe a different approach

Win 98 Retro PC: AMD K6-2+ @ 550mhz, Mitac 5114VU motherboard, 256MB RAM, Radeon 7000 PCI 64MB DDR
Win 95 Retro PC: Intel Pentium 233mmx, Elpina M571 motherboard, 32MB EDO RAM, Voodoo 3 2000 16MB PCI
Main PC: AMD Ryzen 7700x, 32GB DDR5-6000, Geforce 3080

Reply 1 of 1, by shamino

Posted on 2016-03-22, 20:43

shamino Offline

Rank l33t

Rank: l33t
Posts: 2175
Joined: 2013-01-24, 13:45

In order to support the joystick in any application or game, I guess you'd need a TSR driver that supports different keymappings for every identified .exe, or else just lets you change the config every time you call it. Then you'd set up the appropriate calls whenever you launch a different game or go back to the menu. I don't know if anything suitable exists. It would need to be something like a DOS version of Joy2Key.

Perhaps there could be a menu program that supports the joystick as an input, but I don't know of any. Programming the joystick natively in DOS is pretty straightforward and doesn't need an external driver. But writing a menu program from scratch would be a significant project.
Also, native joystick support in the menu doesn't address the problem of individual games that might also expect a keyboard.

If your DOS PC has the "legacy USB support" option in the BIOS, then a USB keyboard should be able to work in DOS.

Go to top of page Go to top of page

Back to General Old Hardware