Needs a Code page 437 font. I think that's just the character set, not the font. I don't know if the font I'm thinking of even has a name, but it was whatever was built into the VGA BIOSes of the time. It has a distinctive look.
3.x is better ... I haven't updated the demo page ... this thing becomes randomly popular every couple of years or so ... I should probably make that demo better.
I wish somebody extended it, covering more classic themes: Turbo Pascal 5 (the blue theme like this), Turbo Pascal 3 (the black / gray / yellow theme), SuperCalc, Word for DOS, etc.
A special challenge would be fitting a theme into the 4-color CGA modes (red/green and purple/blue), complete with low-res proportional fonts and pixelation grids over pictures.
I love this so much. All it needs to be perfect is a bunch of keyboard shortcuts built-in---I really want to be able to use arrow keys to navigate like I'm really in DOS. :-)
Strangely I vividly remember setting (S)VGA text modes to higher counts than 80 per line for such UIs. Maybe my memory fails me and I'm mixing things up with Debian text mode installs?
Yes, some of the tools did, but the ones mentioned here didn't (QBasic, Norton Commander/Utilities, Turbo Pascal/Vision).
Norton Utilities did play some interesting games with modifying the VGA character set in real time, implementing a mouse cursor over the text mode. But it was still 80x25.
However, some if the programs adapted to 80x50 if you enabled that mode before (or while?) starting them.
scaling doesn't work because our screens are different form factors these days. You'd get really fat characters (I've tried it).
2. it's a bug ... I'll fix it
3. sure. it's the microsoft style to be more specific. the manufacturers had their own 'branding' in this sense. I had to pick one of them due to time being a finite resource.
I can see a use case for this -> For software users who are so used to the DOS / Terminal interfaces in some old COBOL, Foxpro, dBase, Clipper, Turbo Pascal and other programming languages back then. You can switch between the shiny newer interface to using the old DOS gui-based look.
I thought I was being original when I redid my website[0] in a similar style this past summer (right down to the text appearing to come in at 9600 baud). But it appears this repo is at least 2 years old..
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 85.5 ms ] thread(it does seem to use one of these for me, seemingly via "font-family: DOS")
better than this http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/
note: A number of the authors seemed to have found out they were listed on that site and increased their contrast. Mission accomplished.
I wish somebody extended it, covering more classic themes: Turbo Pascal 5 (the blue theme like this), Turbo Pascal 3 (the black / gray / yellow theme), SuperCalc, Word for DOS, etc.
A special challenge would be fitting a theme into the 4-color CGA modes (red/green and purple/blue), complete with low-res proportional fonts and pixelation grids over pictures.
http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
But no, I'm glad those days are long gone. I never want to see any of my old dBASE, Clipper, Pascal code again...
Some suggestions:
1. To get a real DOS feeling, the number of characters per line should be limited to (exactly) 80, and the font size should be increased accordingly.
2. Links to headers [1] within the document make the browser scroll to the header text itself, rather than the top of the surrounding colored box.
3. This is mostly a "QBasic" style. There are other styles, such as:
3.1. The "Turbo Vision" style (used by the Turbo Pascal IDE itself, and many other Turbo Pascal applications using the Turbo Vision framework.)
3.2. The "Norton Commander / Nortin Utilities" style
3.3. The "DOS command line" style (command.com)
etc.
[1] https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/components.html#...
Norton Utilities did play some interesting games with modifying the VGA character set in real time, implementing a mouse cursor over the text mode. But it was still 80x25.
However, some if the programs adapted to 80x50 if you enabled that mode before (or while?) starting them.
2. it's a bug ... I'll fix it
3. sure. it's the microsoft style to be more specific. the manufacturers had their own 'branding' in this sense. I had to pick one of them due to time being a finite resource.
Nice work!
Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking, but I really like this look.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983008
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959068
[0] http://saul.pw