The 1st two characters are used by Win2000 to indicate a Unicode file which Win98 doesn't recognize. Look at the DOS window on the 98 machine. The IBM Extended character codes are not the same as the Unicode representations of those same characters. The answer is no. Ctrl, or Alt key pressed.
Programmers can use the scan code to detect when a specific key is pressed.
Game programmers for years have used scan codes in the games they write. Look at a map of a standard 101 key keyboard scan codes. The ISO Latin character set has become the first 256 characters of the Unicode character set. Yet another character set is the ANSI set, whose first 256 ANSI characters are the same as the ISO Latin characters, which are also the first 256 chararacters of the Unicode set. But the characters with codes higher than 255 are different between ANSI and Unicode.