3 Questions

1. How do you change the font and background colour when in MS DOS?

2. I'm about to make a game with a lot of text what is the best way to store it eg. text file or binary?

3. Also is ther a way you can get the time and import it into your program (eg. My game is going to use the real time)?

1) http://www.cprogramming.com/boardfaq.html

3) look in time.h

2) Binary if you care about speed a lot. In a text game it shouldn't matter though. If you want someone editing it just make it text, if not binary.

I've been playing around with a few functions that you *might* be able to use. These are good only for real dos. They will not (at least not yet) work in a 32bit win32 console program. These are used in MSVC ver 1 and the target is a dos exe.

Code:

/* curosr funcs.c */

typedef unsigned char tiny;

tiny getCursorX(void)
{
      tiny xpos;

      _asm
     {
          xor bh,bh
          mov ah,0x03
          int 0x10

          mov xpos,dh
          int 0x10
      }
    
      return xpos;
}

tiny getCursorY(void)
{
      tiny ypos;
      
      _asm
     {
         xor bh,bh
         mov ah,0x03
         int 0x10
   
         mov ypos,dl
         int 0x10
      }

       return ypos;
}

void exitDOS(void)
{
      _asm
      {
          mov ah,0x02
          mov bh,0
          mov dx,0
          int 0x10

          mov ah,0x09
          xor bh,bh
          mov cx,2000
          mov bl,0x07
          mov al,' '
          int 0x10
       }
}

/* a fun one to use */

void centerText(tiny sxpos, tiny expos, tiny sypos, tiny eypos, tiny color, char message[])
{
     tiny center;

     center = (79 - strlen(message)) / 2;

     _asm
    {
         mov ah,6
         xor al,al
         mov bh,color
         mov ch,sxpos
         mov cl,sypos
         mov dh,expos
         mov dl,eypos
         int 0x10
     }

     setCursor(sxpos,center), printf("%s", message);
}

Put the prototypes in a single header. Probably buggy code, but it does what I want for now.

>3. Also is ther a way you can get the time and import it into your program (eg. My game is going to use the real time)?

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int main ( void )
{
  time_t sys_time;
  sys_time = time ( NULL );
  printf ( "%s", ctime ( &sys_time ) );
  return 0;
}

-Prelude

I've been playing around with a few functions that you *might* be able to use. These are good only for real dos. They will not (at least not yet) work in a 32bit win32 console program. These are used in MSVC ver 1 and the target is a dos exe.

Yeah, unfortunately Windows doesn't like those 0x10 interrupt calls. However, Windows does provide some API functions that work just as well for moving the cursor and changing colors. Try SetConsoleTextAttribute, GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo, SetConsoleCursorPosition, FillConsoleOutputAttribute, FillConsoleOutputCharacter, SetConsoleCursorInfo, etc. These are all included in windows.h