Old-fashioned Style (ASCII) & Console Applications

Question

Hello I'm writting (or trying to) a Console Application in C#. I has to be console. I remember back in the old days of Cobol (Unisys) Clipper and even Basic I used to use a program (its name i cannot recall now...) where I designed the screen using this program and then saved it into an ASCII file. (thus using 'extended' ASCII's like Lines Corners etc. and making screens look nicer and more professional). Then reading a stream of bytes you read the screen and rendered (write) it back to the screen. Nothing compared with the DOOM3 upcoming engine but... In unisys i could also bind with codes the fields and it's possitions... bla bla bla... i've explained it all because i would like to make sure you understand what is happening to me. For this console app i'm designing i'd love to use either that technique (which proved to be very simple and useful back in 1990) or something new (which i don't know). I've found a nice class which uses some api calls and allows me to easyly change the screen color and cursor position and clear screen and all the simple utilities you'd love to have for a console app. But i'd love to be able to use my technique (unless someone could point me to something better?) to draw the screens cuz i'd hate to harcode all the stuff. The problem I'm experiencing is... back in 199x I used ASCII Extended(which doesn't exist really) but those 128+ ascii codes does not correspond with their unicode counterparts (as the 1st 128 do). Then if I use an ASCII drawing program (do you remember TheDraw! for example?) and save a small box in ASCII when I later read the stream in C# the output is crap... I use this code: FileStream aFile = new FileStream(test.ascFileMode.Open); StreamReader sw = new StreamReader(aFileSystem.Text.Encoding.ASCII); string line; line = sw.ReadToEnd(); Console.Write(line); sw.Close(); Clearly the output is a typical extendedASCII opened with notepad... The thing is there is no such Encoding.extASCII... what can I do? What do you suggest? Is there such thing as TheDrawForUnicode? so i'd save my screens as .unicode and use the default encoder for a StreamReader...? I'm confused and old fashioned... Ideas? Comments? Help? Everything will be appreciated. thanks in advance and kind regards! Martín Marconcini

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

I must admin that'd be a non elegant but nice solution and why not a very good way to escape from a stupid customer's request. But to be honest i was kinda looking for a Terminal App no GUI allowed. ;) I must confess that your suggestion has been extremely original ... ;) (and it should be taken into consideration should someone else has to build a terminal app). In fact a very crazy win programmer gurú might want to create a .net/activex Control called: TermEmulator... you never now...

chrishornberger · Answer

Ok... what if you *fooled* the users by drawing a window that just *looks* like a dos box? You can do all your own magic and still make it look convincingly like a dos box.

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

laugh at me... ... i created a pif for the c# compiled exe... ... i modified the config.nt and included ansi.sys (which happens to be included in windows xp even when ms documentation appears to deny that). WHatever... it's there... but it didn't work. Nothing happened. I've been checking the source for ColConsole.dll (not made by me) and it uses Unicode. But that i don't care cuz I could use Console.Write() directly bypassing the console framework i'm using. ColConsole is free available for dl at www.cshrp.net /* Color Console Class v0.89 * www.cshrp.net * Created: 2003-05-20 (Patrik.Lowendahl@csharpsweden.com) * Description: This class uses Interop to extend the console in .NET * Read 'readme.txt' for the docs. */ hmmmm... this is getting complicated... if we'd only had ncurses for .NET ;)

chrishornberger · Answer

hmm... ya know... what if we look for a way to emulate the functionality provided by ansi.sys... or even attach ansi.sys to a terminal session?

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

Chornberger The thing is if I create an ansi file (w/out colors) and from a cmd I execute type xxx.ans it will display properly no matter what kind of font the cmd window has. (Lucida or The standard). Of course if i add the color codes i'll see the chars and the color codes messing around... (that could be ok.. so far) But if I cat xxx.asc i will see trash. If I StreamRead(xx.asc) and then Console.Write(stream) i've got trash again... ... i don't think there's a way to parse an ansi file and display apropiate... I could try to code an extension to my ColTerminal.dll and try to emulate at least ansi colors if i'd have the ansi codes... and if I find a way to write those chars to the screen properly (that is as you've said if I can set the terminal to emulate the proper mode)... Gryzor.

chrishornberger · Answer

Hold up j0! Set a dos box to Raster Fonts and they work just fine. Therefore I'm betting an API call or two to create a console window (or modify an existing one) with a font/charset/culture override will do it.

chrishornberger · Answer

Those characters don't exist in some character set somewhere?

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

why not 1200 or 300bps then ??? if you dare!!! my 1st modem could transmit and receive up to 300 bps! ;) I'm kind of frustrated... that ANSI codes cannot be reproduced under .NET :~

james · Answer

I'll start working on an app to emulate at 2400bps connection... then I'll break out my collection of ASCII Art -James

katana · Answer

3 1/2? I have my TAG and VBBS BBS on 5 1/4.. :P

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

Lol!!! My Renegade BBS is still sleeping in some (possibly already corrupted) 3 1/2 set of floppy disks... that's it wanna read/write ANSI Graphics under .NET Where are the Assembler->we->code->it->all master/geeks who can do this? ;)

theeyeofthetornado · Answer

James Thank you very much for your answer. You're correct i was kind of talking about ANSI but ansi graphs could be encoded with color couldn't they? Anyway as I told you i have a very nice c# class (i invite you to see it -> ColorConsole (www.cshrp.net) Created by Patrik.Lowendahl@csharpsweden.com) which is perfect for cursor position change back/fore color clear screen etc. all in a very very easy way... but apparently this is not enough... I guess that i'll investigate a little bit further and the if I can't find a decent not too complicated solution I'll travel back to 1993 and Borland Turbo Pascal or Clipper (all those 5 1/4 floppies hidden somewhere... hope i've got a 3 1/2 version of all that!) THank you very much!

katana · Answer

Yeah.. ANSI Graphics.. damn that was been a while. If someone figures out how to generate them in .NET that would be kewl.. I could re-create my BBS :D

james · Answer

Wow this is really a unique question.. First off what you're referring to as extended ASCII is more appropriately known as ANSI graphics. Those and even ASCII don't exist in .Net (even though the original ASCII set correlates to the first set of Unicode chars). I think its going to be a very difficualt and manual process to replicate the old ANSI style for a console app. My suggestion would be to work with the MODE command in DOS to adjust colors and console settings. The formatting is call going to have to be done on char & line at a time and you will have to use a lot of Carriage Returns w/o Linefeeds to move the cursor around. This is probably the only time I'd recommend this but my best advice would be to do this in a legacy language like Turbo Pascal or even Clipper if you can find a compiler. Then you will get native support for the style of graphics you need. -James