2010/3/12 Kevin O'Connor kevin@koconnor.net:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 03:42:28PM +0800, Roy Tam wrote:
Sorry I can't find documentation on this usage. But instead I have lots of old programs written with this usage. Using undocumented features from BIOS/DOS is very usual in that time.
Can you confirm these other programs fail in the same way (no keyboard input, and "ps2 irq but no data." messages in log when using bios.bin-0.5.1-debug-20100228)?
It's broken because it causes key presses to be lost and corrupted. The ps2 port hardware just doesn't work the way that software is trying to use it.
You said that "it causes key presses to be lost and corrupted" but I haven't heard any complain about this. Real BIOSes (Award BIOS, AMI BIOS, Phoenix BIOS) handle this usage very well and no key press are lost or corrupted.
Under qemu-0.11 normal typing lead to lots of keyboard errors for me. It's possible real hardware would be less susceptible to this error, but there is nothing that a BIOS inside qemu can do to stop the corruption.
and Norton GHOST for DOS (all versions, 8.0/8.2/8.3/11.5 tested) are affected too. for me having corrupted/incomplete scancodes is far better than having null.