question about low-levels windows emulation of curses

[Rapp, Perry]

I'm working on a Win32 emulation of curses.
It is fairly primitive, but it does the job
for the Windows port of lifelines (lifelines.sourceforge.net).
(I've just added arrows & page up/down & home/end keys,
and hit a bug described in #1 below.)

Anyway, I've two questions:

 #1a) Does anyone know how to use ReadConsoleInput
      to read keys on MS-Windows without wrecking the
      Alt shortcuts to generate non-ascii input ?
      I suppose this is not an ncurses question, but I
       had thought whoever did the Windows part of ncurses
       might have hit the same snag I'm hitting, however, 
       #2 means I may not get any help here :)

 #1b) Any suggested directions, where I might find someone
      who has done an MS-Windows version of curses code ?

 #2) On the gnu ncurses home page, the TODO seems to imply
     the gnu ncurses package has no MS-Windows port. Now
     this emulation file is a fairly primitive implementation
     (it doesn't do panels or menus, and does not use any
      terminfo or termcap db -- it only works with console
      windows under MS-Windows), but it is open source -- so if
      anyone wants to add it or some portion to ncurses, please
      let me know.

 #3) re: ncurses/README typo
     In the ncurses-5.2 package I just downloaded now, the
     ncurses/README file says to see misc/hackguide.html,
     but that file is not present. However, there is a file
     doc/hackguide.doc.

Cordially,

Perry
(I'm not subscribed to the ncurses list, which looks very high traffic,
but I can check it via web to see if I get a response.)