Hi,

I'm looking for an on-screen qwerty keyboard for DOS. (Not DOS apps running in windows) That a user can mouse click the on screen keys so the keystrokes can be fed into an application just as a regular fixed keyboard would do. Would anyone know if there is an application available?

Thanks None available that i can think of. If you know of a good programmer they could make this for you however mouse controls might have to be serial COM1 or COM2 or PS2 mouse port. Finding USB Serial programming for DOS without windows is a stretch. Additionally it likely would not be pretty looking in 16-bit.

I have serious doubts that you will be ABLE to do away with the keyboard completely.

 What kind of programs do you want to pass the keystrokes to?

  Someone might be able to write a TSR that could be called by hot key combination like CTRL+K to bring up the GUI keyboard and upon hitting enter it passes the key stream to the application simulating keystrokes and vanishes. Until CTRL+K again. The biggest issue is that whatever our passing keystrokes to via a GUI INTERFACE will need to be the focus, be running when the key stream is sent. So the application you want to run wouldnt be running, you would say CTRL+K to tell the TSR to bring up the GUI interface keyboard, click what you want to pass to it and it stores the keyboard stream,  and then launch the application, and then either a time delay to where it passes the keyboard stream or another hot key combination like CTRL+S to send the keystroke stream to the application through SIMULATED keystrokes. But then your getting into Keyboard Macros. There are keyboard macros out there for DOS, but they are constructed using keyboard and not a GUI point and click.

This is above is beyond my programming skills, but thinking of how it could be constructed and work in a completely only DOS environment. I feel a TSR is the only way to have this GUI Keyboard where its like a service waiting for the keystroke of say CTRL+K to bring up the keyboard and then it stores what is to be typed and passes it LATER when the application is launched later to that application.

TSR's generally run behind the SCENES in memory to hack, modify, or perform some sort of background service to a DOS environment. ( the virus's and hacking of the day were in this TSR category ). So Im thinking this is the only way to make this happen. Will be interesting if you find a method that works.

 If you had Windows running such as Windows 3.11 you would be more apt to have multitasking and a nicer looking GUI keyboard than what DOS can provide.

Thinking deeper 2 computers could be used via a serial null cable and one computer is always up with the mouse GUI and passing serial stream of keystrokes to the 2nd computer which would act like normal but be receiving instructions from the other in a remote control keystroke way through the GUI of the 2nd computer to the first. The first computer would have a TSR listener service running that accepts all keystrokes over serial communications. This I can see working much better than a single computer with only DOS as the OS. The first computer would need a line added to config.sys or autoexec.bat for the TSR to load to RAM on boot. You would be likely running into a very very tight memory band where you have to worry about using too much base memory of the 640k to which DOS programs wont run if too much base memory is in use. himem.sys might help, but its quite a project you have.