Hi,

just wanted to post this here ... pico8 could easily run in a console window (without sdl) ...

webcam in console window with color

gameboy in console window (b/w)

Think of it, ... typing in a fantasy console prints several characters in a real console ;)

Greetings,
movAX13h

I'm not sure his console window is a real console window. It looks more like it's a configurable console simulator. A real console window isn't going to give you 4px x 4px characters, for instance, and thus typically you're not going to get a 320ch x 240ch console to fit on anything less than a 4k monitor. This would be especially true for a genuine text-mode command prompt, though I think those are vanishingly rare these days, even in BIOS screens.

Still, PICO-8 needs only a small number of colors, many of which could be approximated (but not matched) by the basic set of dos or ansi colors. If you used tall glyphs (something close to 1:2 aspect) and then use the half-character graphics blocks combined with fg+bg colors to get two chunky pixels per character, you could probably get something close to a real command prompt PICO-8. The colors would be off, but oh well.

Neat idea.

What if you just somehow used aaLib? Then you wouldn't need a 1 to 1 correspondence of pixels to characters. You could theoretically use a standard console that way?

Whether the games would be playable is another question, of course.

I think caca lib does (limited) colors. Might be more able than aaLib

He does it with a regular windows console application and he published a small helper class for convenience on github.

How's he getting a 4x4 font in the windows command prompt? I'd swear its font options are hardcoded and don't include that size. 4x6 is the smallest.

I've just tried it using his class. The console interpolates at smaller sizes which results in a interesting and kind of authentic retro look. You can try it yourself, just download the examples, create a new c++ console application, include the olcConsoleGameEngine.h and one of the example cpp files (play with the font size settings) and hit compile&run.
https://github.com/OneLoneCoder/videos

Ah, I see. It's a terminology thing.

To me, a console app is a stdio-only command-line app. In windows, you'd run it in either the command prompt or the powershell. In linux, a terminal window.

His apps are interfacing directly with the windows "Console" API, which the command prompt and powershell use to simulate oldschool text modes in a window.

So technically they're text-based, but they aren't standard command-line/command prompt/powershell apps.

Interesting to learn about that API. I didn't know it was exposed. Could be useful...