leedo said:
vista does not support full screen dos/gwbasic (xp did).
Actually, it's only the Aero GUI in Vista which doesn't support full-screen
mode. Vista itself has no problem running a full screen prompt. If you turn
off Aero, you should be able to turn your comand prompt full screen, in the
usual manner (albeit, at the loss of some UI bling). To turn off Aero:
- right-click on the desktop and select Personlise, Window Color and
Appearance.
- click the "Open classic appearance properties for more color options" link
at the bottom of the window. The Appearance Settings dialogue appears.
- you can select to pick a color scheme. Select "Windows Vista Basic" and
press Apply.
Aero will now be disabled. If you need to re-enable Aero, just go through
the same steps, selecting "Windows Aero" instead.
I would settle for
a bigger gwbasic/dos window as my programs print about 1588 characters per
screen.
I can get a window size of 80 rows x 50 columns in QBASIC on Vista = 4,000
chars. Is that not large enough for your app? How many columns and/or rows
do you need? (ie, pls factor 1,588 for me
. 20 rows should do?
When I go into properties by clicking the upper left of the gwbasic/dos
window and set the window to a larger size, vista (or something) ignores
the
requwest and leaves the window small (such sizing requestis with dos,
only,
are fine). Similarly, pressing on the "large" button (upper right) leaves
the window too small to work with.
I think this is intrinsic in the GWBASIC.COM binary; nothing to do with
Vista. I get exactly the same behaviour running QBASIC.EXE on XP - I can
create a command prompt window of any size, and run many DOS apps which use
the full window size. Some other DOS apps always bring it back to 80x25. My
default command prompt is 96 x 50. But when I start QBASIC on XP, the window
instantly shrinks back to 80 x 50. When I exit QBASIC, it returns to 96 x
50.
So I suspect that GW-BASIC is behaving the same way as QBASIC, and forcing a
screen size. Remember the way a PRINT statement would always wrap at 80
columns, anyway? I suspect these old forms of BASIC just don't know how to
handle a wider screen ...
I guess you've already received lots of gratuitous advice about upgrading,
over the years; but ... GW-BASIC was in the legacy class, even back in
MS-DOS 6.22 days!!! There are better options today. For a free BASIC
interpreter built in to XP, Vista and Windows Server, look at VBScript. If
you use the WScript.StdOut.WriteLine statement, you can print output to a
console Window just like you would in GW-BASIC (ie it doesn't have to be a
GUI tool). Plus you get access to all the new facilities of the Windows
operating system (registry, WMI, Printing, networking, Internet, etc).
Anyway just a thought ...
Hope this helps
Andrew
