So I've been working lately..but since there's nothing to do I've gutted out one of the old computers, reinstalled the OS and installed visual studio and such so it's almost a home-away-from-home. While I've been bored out of my mind, I've made a cool little DOS console rendering class.
Basically it sets up the DOS window so you have an 80x50 area (or 80x100 if you use the block character trick that I used for rendering the bitmaps) for rendering text to a buffer and swapping it to the screen really fast (I achieved about 900 fps on some computers with it in realtime mode). I've added support for a mouse and such, and I've done a couple random things, like print out an ASCII reference table.
The cool thing I just finished though is a bitmap renderer using my Image Express library...it can load a bitmap and print it to the screen (using the available 16 colors) and does a somewhat decent job of it.
Here's a screeny and some apps for you to play with.
If you want code, feel free to ask and I'll post it. I might be doing a little tutorial thing on my site about this stuff, as it's fun to dabble with.
These two attachments need to be renamed to .zip to be opened.
Note: ImageLoader quits when you press a key, the ASCII table one has a + for the cursor. If you go in to full-screen (alt-enter) it works best.
