#108 DOSBox should be able to run in a text-only console mode

[Patrick McMunn]

Please add the ability to run DOSBox in a text console for running text-only applications. For example, I'd like to use DOSBox to run BBS door games - most of which are old DOS programs. These programs typically use plain text and/or ANSI console graphics. In my own case, I have the BBS server running headless and ssh into it, and I many need to run a console-based configuration program manually, so I need to be able to run DOSBox in a text console.

[Qbix]

you could mess with the SDL environment settings.
SDL_video_driver=dummy or what the exact syntax is, might be useful for you.

[Bastien Nocera]

Using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy dosbox [BINARY] isn't good enough for my use case. I'd like the output of the command to go to the stdout (and with the error code passed back as well?) and for dosbox to exit when the command has finished running.

The use would be to wrap otherwise unavailable commands for modern operating systems, for example, wrapping SNASM68K[1] in Linux, as done in this DOSBox fork:
https://github.com/pascalorama/snasm68kdb/issues/2#issuecomment-304620776

[Marc Champagne (Ts)]

Well, SCO had Merge 4 (1998, there were earlier versions too) that did just that, DOS at the text prompt, it worked superbly!.

I spent the better part of my afternoon trying to get a dos prompt in my no-desktop ubuntu server only to find out, it just doesn't exist.

I'm an oldie, been work'n with *nix since the Xenix days (80's), basically I'm a text console kinda person, graphical *nix just doesn't fit me!