I like Qemu for a lot of things, probably the most is that it is quick. Hence the name. However, in my opinion, it lacks quite a few things.
I also use Bochs, and have even written a lot of the "external" parts of it, namely the USB as well as some of the floppy and hard drive stuff. The advantage to bochs is that it has a considerable amount of debugging capabilities as well as a single step capable debugger. The disadvantage, it is quite slow, in fact it is probably the slowest of all the emulators I know and use.
For you, the advantage would be that the LED state is displayed on the status bar of the Bochs window. i.e.:, when the Caps Lock is pressed within the quest, the Host shows it on the status bar of the Host Window. No need to reboot each time you make a small modification.
However, please note that Bochs is quite a bit slower than Qemu, though it is much faster than the process of writing to a USB drive, rebooting to test, then rebooting back to your development environment.
Try it and see what you think
Ben
--
http://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm
Bochs SVN:
https://sourceforge.net/p/bochs/code/HEAD/tree/
or a downloadable executable:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bochs/
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