From: Kevin S. <ks...@ez...> - 2013-09-26 02:31:19
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On 23-Sep-2013, at 12:56:45 -0400, Earnie Boyd wrote: > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Kevin Scott wrote: >> >> On 22-Sep-2013, at 13:45:11 -0400, Earnie Boyd wrote: >> >>> I don't know anyone else using full-screen mode of the command window >>> either; nor do I know how to turn that on. >> >> It's a setting in the "properties" of the command window. >> Right-click on the window (or within the title bar) to >> access the properties menu. > > It is not an item in my properties settings. > >> Keyboard shortcuts (these work in both modes): >> alt-enter - toggles between windowed and full-screen mode > > Not for me. > >> [...] > > Maybe there is a mode con setting for full screen mode? After a bit of sleuthing/searching on this, apparently the reason you're not seeing a properties choice for full-screen text mode is that the full-screen option is something that's available in WXP and earlier, but tends to be unavailable in W7 without some extra driver configuration (and the driver configuration to allow this as a properties choice will probably be a configuration that most people would not want to keep in place for their normal day-to-day use). I take it you're probably running W7 or newer. Is that true? If you'd like to try full-screen text mode in W7, here's how to get to it. The underlying problem is that the graphics drivers for WXP and earlier were required to give access to the hardware full-screen text mode, while drivers for Vista and later aren't (or don't; I found some mention of an instability issue with INT 10, which is used to switch video modes, as the reason why full-screen text mode was removed from W7 graphics drivers). To make the full-screen choice appear in CMD.EXE's properties, you'll need to turn off your graphics driver (temporarily, while using the full-screen text mode). I found the procedure at http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1441-63-full-screen-mode-programs and tried it out with someone who has a W7 computer with a wide-aspect-ratio LCD display (although without MinGW on it), and it worked. Here's what to do: 1) right-click on "my computer" 2) choose "manage" 3) choose "device manager" 4) select "display adaptors" 5) double-click on your display adaptor that you want to adjust 6) right-click on "card info" 7) choose "disable", and "yes" When the display-adaptor-specific driver is turned off, the system will revert to a generic VGA driver, which is a WXP-style driver that does provide access to full-screen text mode. On the sample system that we tried this on, the display appearance became crude and blurry-looking (and low-res) when the W7 driver was turned off, but at least it worked. Then we started up CMD.EXE, and pressed alt-enter, and it switched into full-screen mode (50 lines). We were then able to use the "mode" command to set it to 25 lines, if desired. When done with all this, to switch back to the proper W7 driver, exit from CMD.EXE, and follow a similar procedure as listed above, to turn the driver back on. We had a little trouble at this point in getting the display settings back to the proper resolution; the needed resolution setting for the wide-screen display wasn't initially among the choices offered. But a reboot got the system back to the normal appearance of the display. Kevin |