VOGONS

PowerBASIC 3.5 help system (printing/screen capturing)

Topic actions

First post, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Okay, having managed to find a copy of PowerBASIC 3.5 (which in many ways is superior to QBasic/QuickBASIC/VBDos/GWBasic/etc. I started playing with its features. Many are familiar to me from the afore mention BASIC dialects. However PowerBASIC contains a few unique features and uses an unusual syntax here and there. PowerBASIC fortunately does have a fairly decent online help built in, however and this the point of this is whole post:

There appears to be no way to copy/paste (internal to PowerBASIC itself) parts of the online help to the editing window. QuickBASIC does have such a feature. Also unlike the former, PowerBASIC does not offer any option to print the manual or anything from the editing window. (If the latter were possible I would simply copy/paste into that and print from there.)

I don't think DOSBox has a feature to save text-based (TUI's) screens to a screen-capture file the same way it does save screenshots to *.png image files. Otherwise I could have used that method.

So I guess my final question is:
Does anybody reading this know of a DOSBox variant that allows me to copy/paste from a TUI into Windows, or perform a print-screen (old-school DOS did that when the user presssed the "Print Screen" button) to the printer. If I don't want to print to my printer I can probably have Windows redirect whatever I want printed to a file.

Anyone?

Last edited by Peter Swinkels on 2021-09-09, 13:31. Edited 1 time in total.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 1 of 10, by Calvero

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

You could run it in DOSBox debugger and dump the memory at 0xB800:0000. And then remove every other byte.

Reply 2 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

@calvero: that’s rather tedious. Only as a last ditch effort. Especially multiple screens.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 3 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

@calvero:
Your suggestion gave me an idea! I made a modified version of my Memory Dumping TSR which I wrote a while ago and made a text screen dumping app!

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 4 of 10, by _Rob

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

DOSBox-X supports copy and paste of text. You can copy a text screen to your clipboard for instance. It also supports TTF fonts in text mode, and higher text modes like 132 columns and 60 lines.

The attachment Screenshot from 2021-09-11 17-44-21.png is no longer available

Reply 5 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

@_Rob: I will check it out.

@Anyone else: I am updating my text dumping app to have a few more useful features.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 6 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

@_Rob: found it, it does copy all text to the clipboard. Nice!

Anyway, I am still going to update my text dumping app. I've already made several improvements to the existing code. (support for different screen pages, 40-column support, screen mode detetion). I am also going to add a feature where line-breaks can either be inserted or not. And there will be the option to append to earlier dumps.

That, and the code should be much cleaner when I am done.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 7 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Okay, I managed to get all the extra featured I wanted working. The code needs some optimizing (and a few other minor changes to the program itself) but the program works as expected.

F11 = No appending to previous capture.
F12 = Append to previous capture.
Shift = Disable line break insertion.

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 8 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Final version for now:

https://github.com/PeterSwinkels/Screen-Capture-TSR

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Reply 10 of 10, by Peter Swinkels

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

@Ringding:
This link: https://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/screen.htm#screencapt - might come in handy! Thanks!

Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!

Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to DOSBox General
Close window
Close window