If you really wanted to, you could set something up to take screen captures of the DOSBox window, run them through OCR, and get text that way. (You could probably even cobble together the OCR yourself, considering that DOS programs have a limited, fixed-width character set and the screen captures are pixel-accurate.)

But I agree, Frotz might be a better idea.

SquallStrife wrote:

brettglass wrote:

(Could also use scrollback so I could review a game and do copies of more than a screen of text.)

DOSBox's CLI isn't a console window like CMD, it's an emulated CGA/EGA/VGA display. You don't have scrollback in real DOS, so you don't have it in DOSBox.

If you want to do text based adventure games, you could use an interpreter like Frotz if they're based on the Infocom Z-Machine engine. These would likely support the copy-paste functions you want.

DOSBox does have a shell, so one would think it could maintain a scrollback buffer within the display window just like cmd.exe does. DESQview could do it too.

I do have some Infocom games, but also a lot of others such as Scott Adams games.

But real Dos didn't have scrollback. To get that functionality you needed a replacement command.com - like 4Dos, for example. You could always download and use one of those inside DOSBox to get that feature.

Yes. But to scroll back and capture, I need native text capture. That's the feature that must be integrated to work.

no, there is NO MUST. DOSBox is for games. We don't care about applications.
So this feature is non-essential.

Again, I need this for games. (And games ARE applications, BTW.)

Qbix didn't say that games aren't applications 😉
But applications that aren't games are of no concern to dosbox devs.

Again, why do you need this (copy function) for games? And which games would this actually work with?

And there is NO game that needs this function. It might be convenient for you but that's about it

Dominus wrote:

It might be convenient for you but that's about it

Probably, but with Infocom's text adventures I see the point.

I'm a fan of text-based adventures and have a big collection of them. I am not sure why you would not be willing to support them, as it is surely easier than supporting every weird graphics mode.

Any given Z-Machine interpreter program (for Infocom games) can have a backscroll buffer if the author chooses to implement one; it doesn't have to be a feature of the operating system.

I see the point of pasting stuff into dosbox which can be done but I don't see the point of copying from a game in dosbox to the host.

And why are you stating that dosbox doesn't support those games? It DOES support them the same way as DOS did.

If you play them as they were played back then I see no problem. It's just not supporting the way YOU want to play them throughhelp of the host system.

Every "DOS box" that has been implemented since Windows 3.0 and OS/2 has had the ability to copy data out of the window (and also to scroll back). I use these features regularly. Not having them makes DOSBox difficult to use. Were the code not GPLed, I would go in and hack it myself, but as a commercial programmer I cannot work on GPLed code due to contamination issues.

DOSBox also has a few bugs that could use fixing. For example, after its window has been partially overlaid by another, it updates only the portion that was overlaid and not the rest. The problem goes away if you move the window. This is a Windows programming error that I've seen before.

Dosbox is a dos emulator not a command prompt emulator. Try to understand this first

I do not need a command prompt emulator; I can load in a COMMAND.COM from any of several DOS clones or from actual MS-DOS and if the emulation is good enough it will run. I can even bring in the old Norton shell. I need a DOS/BIOS emulator, which is what DOSBox is. Writing text to the screen under DOS is done three ways: via DOS calls (sometimes with the help of the ANSI.SYS driver), via the BIOS, or via direct memory mapping. DOSBox seems to support all three methods. When text is written through DOS calls, the screen scrolls once the cursor gets to the bottom and it's possible to catch the text that scrolls off the top. If one is emulating enough of DOS to do the scrolling, it's very easy to create a scrollback buffer. Likewise, it's easy to capture characters from screen memory.

You are always refering to the dos boxes in Windows, those are the command prompts. Dosbox is not emulating that. Don't confuse it with that or deliberately ignore that.

Actually, the DOS boxes in windows can run any program. They are not "command prompts," though Windows does come with a shortcut labeled "Command Prompt" that runs a command interpreter, cmd.exe, in one of them. They don't need to run cmd.exe, though. In Windows 3.0 through XP, you can set them up to directly execute any DOS program. They emulate a memory mapped screen/BIOS/DOS environment, just like DOSBox does. Unfortunately, the DOS box is absent in 64-bit versions of XP and Windows 7.

Of course they are command prompts, or actually command prompt in NT based Windows and MS Dos Prompt in the Windows 3.x and Windows 9x.
In NT all dos programs that you run are run via cmd.exe, the command prompt, be it by firststarting cmd.exe or directly starting them.

Please try to understand this, Dosbox is not emulating the command prompt or cmd.exe or command.com. It is emulating Dos or actually a machine running Dos. Things you can do on the command prompt or what you call Dos boxes are not necessarily things you can do in Dosbox. If you couldn't copy/paste from those games in real DOS (not you so called dos boxes) then you can't in Dosbox.

For the command prompt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Prompt or read http://commandwindows.com/command1.htm which might further clear up your misconceptions.

Btw, the dos box/command prompt is not absent in 64 bit Windows NT. You just can't run 16bit programs.

Btw, if you are a programmer why don't you fix that yourself? You don't need to worry about contamination if you keep the changed program to yourself. Hooray, problem solved.

brettglass wrote:

Every "DOS box" that has been implemented since Windows 3.0 and OS/2 has had the ability to copy data out of the window (and also to scroll back). I use these features regularly. Not having them makes DOSBox difficult to use. Were the code not GPLed, I would go in and hack it myself, but as a commercial programmer I cannot work on GPLed code due to contamination issues.

I'm not clear what you think "contamination issues" are, but you being a commercial programmer for alternate programs in no way influences your ability to provide updates for DOSBox. Even if you wanted to use DOSBox as part of a commercial program, there is no restriction on such outside of needing to provide the source code for any of your modifications (per GOG, and other releasers of old game that use DOSBox).

As a commercial programmer, I cannot view GPLed code, because if I do then a claim could be made that something I wrote was derived from it and that therefore it would have to be published for free. Can't take that risk. If you used a license such as BSD, Apache, or Creative (Perl), I could hack on it.

By the way: the shell window in 64-bit Windows is just that: a shell window but not a "DOS box." It doesn't emulate DOS.