Display non-printable/ANSI characters

Hi All,

I have been thinking about the days when BBS's (Bulletin Boards) were all the rage. I am planning on creating a simple text only game similar to an online BBS game I loved called 'Exitilus' or something. I was wondering if using Blitz3D if it is possible to print ANSI characters. I vaguely recall in order to type them, I had to hold down my ALT key and type numbers, i.e Hold ALT + 184 would display some character that could be used for borders. Anyone have any ideas? I was kinda hoping to make this a text only game.

Any other thoughts or info would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Al

Well, I'm not sure Blitz is set up, natively, to mess with ANSI. But, there's no reason you can't create your own interpretation using bitmap images. Use a SELECT....CASE in which each ANSI code can be called up, and have a bitmap representation of the corresponding ANSI character (use Keydown to watch for ALT keys being pressed ) The program's code will respond to keyboard-only interaction, even if you have to use bitmaps to form the desired image(s).

Extended ASCII, not ANSI. Character 184 in the ANSI Character Set is a cedilla (a funny looking comma), while 184 in the Extended ASCII Character Set is a line-drawing character.

Extended ASCII defines the glyphs which used to be characters 128-255 (including line-drawing characters;) it is now referred to as ISO Latin1. Blitz3D's text output commands can deal with characters numbered 0-255, so you just need to find a font with ISO Latin1 characters mapped to the 128-255 range, just like they were in the olde days.

P.S. BlitzMax is able to access characters above 255.

I was going to say what octothorpe said. You just need to find the right font with the characters you want...

Though you will still be better off writing your own implementation using bitmaps because it will most likely be quite a bit faster.

My bitmap font routine could be adapted very easily for the purpose.

Thanks for the tips everyone, I will probably go with the graphics, as I really am only after about 9-10 of these to create my borders.

Cheers all and I hope everyone had a great new year.

Al