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Enable full-screen mode consoles in Windows 7 32-bit
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Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2010 9:45 am Posts: 29
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![Post Post](./styles/serenity/imageset/icon_topic_latest.gif) Enable full-screen mode consoles in Windows 7 32-bit
Look at the attached ZIP samples.
They contain .COM files capable of displaying VGA console graphics.
The procedure to enable full screen consoles in 32-bit Windows is this:
Run sysdm.cpl Disable your graphic card's driver in Hardware tab -- Device Manager button Run cmd Run start from this console to open more VGA-capable ones Press Alt+Enter to make it full screen Press Alt+Enter again to return to Windows Re-enable your graphic card's driver in Hardware tab -- Device Manager button
Now your open consoles or new ones will be capable of entering full-screen mode.
If your video is trashed when returning, just run monoff.exe from the ZIPs, or run a Windows video mode changing program to fix it.
The key for making the program work is to set video mode with the BIOS first, then access ports manually. It seems that Windows 7 blocks the effect of port writes from the BIOS, but if we call it first and then set VGA registers manually, it seems that Windows 7 caches the hardware resources that were requested by privileged BIOS code and allows us to access them manually too from the same process.
The consoles are left enabled for native CGA/EGA/VGA, which means that they must be configured by a global OS process (probably the GUI/CLI subsystem), and then the rest of programs that we open are allowed to access those functions due to the global hardware permisson cache.
We need to make a skeleton to easily initialize graphics modes for MS-DOS applications compatible with the Windows 7 graphics console.
I learned this trick thanks to ZSNES 1.36, the only MS-DOS graphics program that works under Windows 7 (see the README.TXT for more infomation).
It also makes me think that if we access hardware and other resources in this way, Windows will allow us to access hardware that otherwise wouldn't let us reach with such ease thanks to an apparent permission cache per process, specially MS-DOS ones.
Running programs from the current DOS executable is also left, to display graphics programs for which we don't have feasible source, from our wrapper.
_________________ Live Development (click image links for full size): PC 1: PC 2:
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Fri Oct 04, 2019 12:48 pm |
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