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Screen Painter

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,133
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
Sometimes I have to work on projects that requires a monitor to display a static interface, control or logo without looking like it's obviously MS Paint opened fullscreen. For that I just use Visual Basic as a window painter that I can turn off all UI effects, compile it as an exe and when the system is delivered to a location they just need to run the file and the display they wanted opens fullscreen and is immune to mouse clicks and all typing short of the three-key-salute. Saves a ton of time trying to construct something in Photoshop/Gimp.
I have nothing for DOS however. The past few times I had to deliver a an 80's or early 90's 80 x 50 text or low-res color graphics display it was me manually designing it in a batch file that just placed characters/symbols and making it all align.
Is there anything out there that lets me "paint" to the display in a DOS environment and lets me take advantage of extended ASCII/ANSI on both text mode and color text modes?
 
Sounds like what you want is an ANSI editor like TheDraw or ACiDDraw. Both should let you save the screen as a .com file, or as ANSI that could be TYPEd do the screen as long as ansi.sys is loaded.
 
Never realized that there were special programs available for these kind of drawings. One is never too old to learn!
 
There were more specialized programs geared towards designing and prototyping text mode user interfaces, although I've never really used those. Maybe Visual Basic for DOS or Turbo Vision are more in line with what VB does on Windows.

ANSI screen editors like ACiDDraw/TheDraw just give you a free-form, draw-anything-you-want interface. Since the ansi art scene is still active, there are more modern multi-platform tools that can produce these screens for DOS (for instance PabloDraw and Moebius). Although they typically lack the more DOS-centric options like exporting to .com files.
 
For a final export to a com file really all you'd need is a straight dump of vga memory, and whatever mode it's in. For something like 80x25 text mode that's just a 4kB dump starting at B800:0000, and for something like Mode 13h, a 64kB dump from A000:0000 (and then the palette if changed from IO ports). Then the com file would be as simple setting the mode, then copying the data into memory. Then sitting in an infinite loop (or waiting for a keyboard press)
Presumably the ANSI art options already have essentially this as an export format, though may also just have it as a text string that you can print to the screen with ANSI.SYS loaded, and that could be a simple batch file that is just `type someansi.txt` then an infinite loop.
 
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