Render to console

[unxed]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

With modern advanced terminals, like kitty, it is possible to have full information about keyboard events in console apps (key up/down events, modifiers state, etc). It is also possible to color any screen cell in any TrueColor color. May it be possible now to make DOSBox-X render text EGA/VGA/... modes to console? As it already can render text using TrueType now.

What you want

I want a possibility to render virtual DOS computer text modes to Linux (BSD, Mac, ...) console as modern versions of Wine do with console Windows apps.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Alternative is to use command line to run specific DOS text mode apps, capture their output to files and read those files from the host system. But this is not an option for interactive apps.

Additional information

No response

Have you checked that no similar feature request(s) exist?

• I have searched and didn't find any similar feature request.

Code of Conduct & Contributing Guidelines

• I agree to follow the code of conduct and the contributing guidelines.

[Torinde]

Related:

• Run applications in (Linux) console #3968
• Terminal mode for DOS development (ANSI passthrough or curses text mode) dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging#1450

[unxed]

Also modern terminals allow clipboard access via OSC 52 and Bracketed paste. It would be great to "forward" this functionality to virtual DOS machine as Windows API clipboard functions provided over DPMI. As alternative, clip and paste utilites may be implemented for this.

[Torinde]

Related - a headless mode is apparently supported:

• what is the dosbox-staging equivalent of SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy that works with vanilla dosbox dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging#3985 (reply in thread)

the projects will just use dosbox(or dosbox-x) as before (for many years)

[Torinde]

Console redirection is also useful for freeing Conventional memory - to reach up to 960KB. Maybe a .conf option can allow a choice between:

• host console
• COM/LPT/etc.
• NUL/completely headless
• TCP/IP "terminal"

In combination with disabling boot ROM after boot-up (emulating SCP-200B/86-DOS) the whole 1MB can be reached - allowing to perform "linking the linker" without using a 386.