c - Can You Still Achieve MS-DOS like GUI In CLI?

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It's been many years since I've looked into this. Maybe when I was just getting into C++. But is it still possible to achieve MS-DOS like graphics on a command line interface? Obviously with some small hacks that you can achieve the color scheme. However I'm looking more into menu options. I.e. radio controls menu select.

And yes I know you can also achieve this probably a little bit easier using SDL. But I was just curious if anyone else has accomplish this and has some details posted on the Internet or can possibly point me in the right direction. If this is not as easy to achieve anymore on windows 10 I'll just go on and find something else to do for fun.

Thanks.

"possible" for sure, newer versions add more features to console. Something ready to use without redoing from scratch? No idea but probably. After all there is Windows Core...it may not be such absurd requirement – Adriano Repetti Oct 4, 2016 at 17:07 The default character set used by the Windows command line is still the same after all these years, so the characters needed for things like radio buttons are still there. – Mark Ransom Oct 4, 2016 at 17:09 I'm not really looking for a library to do the job. This project is more or less for fun. (Just to see if I can emulate the old days.) But if all I need is some ASCII text, and some basic Win32 api functions, I'm happy. – ajm113 Oct 5, 2016 at 7:05

Yes, absolutely. You can either use functions such as Set/GetConsoleScreenBufferInformationEx or you can enable VT-100 escape sequences and use those (you'll remember this as ANSI.sys in DOS).

That's the more portable method, as the only windows-specific part should be enabling VT-100 mode, everything else should be the same on Linux.

SetConsoleMode: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686033(v=vs.85).aspx

Or to read and write the console buffer directly:

Console APIs: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682073(v=vs.85).aspx

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