Even text mode uses (has to use) a graphical surface in dosbox, so this won't work as is.

Why do you want to do this?

MiniMax wrote:

Why do you want to do this?

It'd be cool to play text games in pure text mode. Dosemu already has support for this as a dumb terminal "video card".

leileilol wrote:

It'd be cool to play text games in pure text mode.

Why would you want to play in pure text mode?

MiniMax wrote:

leileilol wrote:

It'd be cool to play text games in pure text mode.

Why would you want to play in pure text mode?

Why require the start of an X server to just only play text mode games?

Why not?

What if you can't? (Xserver compile bug, long offline professional corporate support delays)

Bad luck then, use dosemu.

I want this because I have a DOS program that only used text mode. I am currently running it remotely over an X session, but it uses a lot of bandwidth on the network. dosemu is not able to run this application for some unknown reason.
If dosbox could instead only send the text chars from the text mode, much less bandwidth could be used. I know that when a VGA card is run in text mode, the characters are stored in video memory as chars, and not bitmaps.

If dosbox could instead only send the text chars from the text mode

Then you need to program that.

ctty comes to mind

jcdutton wrote:

I am currently running it remotely over an X session, but it uses a lot of bandwidth on the network.

Ahh!!! FINALLY valid reason for wanting to use text-mode only instead of "It would be cool!!!"

I am not up to date on how well X-traffic is normally compressed, but check if you have an option somewhere in the X-server for compression.

If not, try running your X-session over an SSH-tunnel with compression enabled in SSH.

Or, try VNC. VNC might be more effective when it comes to screen updates.

You can try nx for X compression. Also, there's always ssh -X -C, which does deflate compression, IIRC