[fpc-other] you may say I'm a dreamer... :)

[Travis Siegel]

Dos screen readers have done screen scraping for years, it'd be easy 
enough to pull the required information from the screen buffer, (which 
is how most dos screen readers handle things), then you could easily get 
any information you eeded from the dos application.  Of course, it 
would't hurt to monitor normal i/o routines as well, to ensure you have 
all information available, (again, something most dos screen readers 
do), but with a combination of watching io ports, and video memory 
watching, it's a trivial matter to get all the available information 
from any dos screen.  There are one or two dos screen readers available 
with source, (provox is one I've used quite extensively) where you could 
remove the speech output routines, and simply use it for the i/o 
monitoring, and obtain the required results.


On 9/23/2018 5:08 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> On 23/09/18 08:15, Paul Breneman wrote:
>> On 09/21/2018 05:07 PM, duilio foschi wrote:> I dream of a automated 
>> virtual machine that can run in a software> bubble, as possible with 
>> Vmware Workstation, VIrtualbox and other> products.> > However in my 
>> dream this bubble should take keyboard commands from a> windows 
>> application external to the bubble, and this application> should be 
>> able to do screen scraping from the bubble screen (virtual> and 
>> invisible from the PC screen).> > In this way, one would be able to 
>> use algorithms existing in old EXE> applications inside his own 
>> modern application without writing any> code.> > Or one would be 
>> finally able to send a whatsapp message from his own> application.> > 
>> Has this automated virtual machine ever been implemented ?> > Thank 
>> you> > Peppe Polpo
>> I'm not sure I understand much about your concept.  Have you taken a 
>> look at Levinux?  Comments appreciated!
>
> I see what he's getting at, and it's something I've considered in the 
> context of calling (a DLL associated with) a development tool in the 
> past (specifically, the compiler for the Propeller chip).
>
> I accidentally hit the wrong button a couple of days ago and mailed 
> him directly, but for the record in case my thoughts are useful to 
> anybody:
>
> "You can certainly run text-based programs in DOSemu or Bochs under 
> Linux. If the guest program communicated solely by stdin and stdout 
> then communications should be easy enough to manage.
>
> "If the guest used scancodes for input (i.e. "PC-DOS" rather than 
> "MS-DOS" programming techniques), it's still probably not too bad. If 
> it wrote to arbitrary locations on the screen... that would be a real 
> problem, I've previously looked at scraping arbitrary fields from 
> (Minitel) terminal output and it was a pain.
>
> "In any case, as well as the communications aspect the host would 
> probably need some sort of scripting to drive the guest program in a 
> closed loop (i.e. /this/ is collected from the screen and /that/ is 
> sent to the keyboard), as well as to e.g. send a WhatsApp message."
>
> He assures me that he doesn't have money to put on the table :-)
>


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