In article <344bcd9a.56117...@news.earthlink.net>,
        sdan...@earthlink.net (Stephen J. Daniel) wrote:

Here are routines to write to KeybBuf:

PROCEDURE ClearBuf;
BEGIN
  memW[$0040:$001A] := memW[$0040:$001C];
END;

PROCEDURE WriteBuf(st : STRING);
VAR
 a : INTEGER;
 e : BYTE ABSOLUTE $0040:$001C;

PROCEDURE IncBuf;
BEGIN
  CASE e OF
    $003C : e := $001E;
    ELSE    Inc(e,2);
  END;
END;

: Someone game me an old DOS based Turbo Pascal program.  It needs to be
: fed via keystrokes including arrow keys.  Output goes to a file which
: can open and use with all sorts of WIN 95 programs.  I need to run the
: program in a loop changing some or all of the inputs each time.  I'd
: like to automate this, let in run in the background.  I need a way for
: this program to get the keystrokes from a file rather than from the
: keyboard. How can this be done?

1)  Rewrite the program to do what you need it to do
2)  Recompile the existing program to do what you need it to do
3)  Stuff the keyboard buffer and then run the program. If it doesn't
    clear the buffer first, you might be able to run a program first that
    reads the file and stuffs the keyboard buffer. It's kludgey, but
    I admit that this trick worked for one of the programming teams I was
    when we needed a quick fix for some code years ago.

  prog param1 param2

instead call it as this

  prog param1 param2 < input.txt

where input.txt is the file containing the keystrokes.
In this case, you don't even have to recompile.

If this doesn't work, you'll have to change the program.
If it was turbo 4.0 or higher, and the program uses Crt,
it may help to simply write

  assign(input,'');
  reset(input);