OSDev.org

The procedure to enable full screen consoles in 32-bit Windows is this:

Run sysdm.cpl
Disable your graphic card's driver in Hardware tab -- Device Manager button
Run cmd
Press Alt+Enter to make it full screen
Press Alt+Enter again to return to Windows
Re-enable your graphic card's driver in Hardware tab -- Device Manager button

Now your open consoles or new ones will be capable of entering full-screen mode.

In most modern computers the video will be trashed when you return, but you can fix it by running a program that turns of the screen (see the attached ZIP and run monoff.exe, place it in C:\WINDOWS\).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The w7vga.com demo program shows you how to make graphics program with standard VGA modes (3h, 4h, 12h, 13h, ModeX, other tweaked modes) that are actually capable of running under 32-bit Windows 7 natively.

The trick is to set the video mode with the BIOS and then manually set the VGA register values. It will make display correctly old graphics programs (for example make a program that sets video in this way and call and old program from the video-setting program, and it will now display correctly under Windows 7).


I learned this trick thanks to ZSNES 1.36 for DOS. I noticed that it's the only graphical MS-DOS program that displays correctly in an HP ProBook 6470b with AMD video card. It's the only program that sets graphics modes with the BIOS and also manually as a pair.

It's extremely important as it allows us to develop GUIs under modern Windows 7 and hardware natively without having to reboot, also with access to DOS, sound accessible from DOS, the file system, DPMI, and the rest of the system with different techniques.

Look at this other attached example in mode 13h of 3D rotation of dots in a sphere, demonstrating that Windows 7 is still capable of developing console graphics.

If you can run it, it means that you support a standard CGA/EGA/VGA card under 32-bit Windows 7.



It must be that the system has a permission cache for resources where you can manually access I/O ports and other resources that have first been accessed by official code in an application. So if we use VGA ports with INT 10h, we can later also access them manually via I/O ports from that application.

Maybe anything that we access with privileged system code in an application is left for us to use manually.

A video about the procedure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqAR2tT9C98