dgil@pa.reuter.COM (Dave Gillett) (11/12/90)
In <34@norand.UUCP> sdx@norand.UUCP (Steve Fredrickson) writes: >I am looking for a pair of programs/TSR's/??? which can record and >play back keystrokes on an IBM-PC or compatible running MS-DOS. What's a keystroke? Well, to some programs, it's a result returned from a BIOS call; it's relatively easy to latch onto the BIOS, record all of the things it returns, and feed them into its buffer to reproduce those effects. Unfortunately, these BIOS results only reflect some of the things that happen on the keyboard, and they don't do it in real time. If the software you want to fake keyboard entries to depends on a keystroke that the BIOS doesn't support, you have to fake the hardware event to reproduce it. Maybe there's a way to do this, short of V86 mode on a 386, but I don't know how. The timing issue means that if the software you're talking to wants to clear the keyboard buffer before asking for a response to a prompt, there's a good chance (depending on how it does that...) that it will swallow all of your saved keystrokes at that point. I've heard of one or two programs that claim to do what you want. It would be impossible to guarantee that they will work with every application that you have in mind, however; at this point, it is safer to use facilities built into the applications themselves. (Gee, too bad MS Word doesn't have one yet.) Dave