Is this true? (About MS-DOS Print Screen)

[aimeeandbeatles]

I couldn't find it in Google.

I read in Windows for Dummies that in DOS, if you hit the Print Screen key while there were graphics on the screen, it would come out a garbled mess.

Is it true?

P.S. Here's the portion --

Spoiler :

P.P.S. The sites I got on Google seem to say there's a driver to make it properly print graphics? I don't know if I misinterpreted it.

 

[Abaddon]

Why use MS-Dos?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I don't. I was wondering if it was true.

 

[Mise]

Makes sense - how on Earth would MSDOS know how to print graphics to every single printer ever made? In Windows, you need drivers. To print text, you don't really need drivers - you just need to send all the characters to the printer and the printer itself can handle it. The printer speaks a different language than the graphics card / engine, so you would need to translate what's on the screen to printer-speak somehow.

 

[Speedo]

It's true. The default function of PrtScn in DOS is to copy the contents of memory buffer used by the display over to the standard printer port. The printer then tries to directly print this data, interpreting it as text. If it *is* text, no problem. If it's not, something is going to have to tell the printer how to interpret the data in order to make a printable picture from it. This is what drivers were made for.

If you want to see the same principle in action, take an image of whatever type and open it in Notepad. You'll get a bunch of junk. Notepad reads the image data and tries to show it as text because it doesn't know how to do anything else. Image editors/viewers know how to translate the image data into a pretty picture.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Thank you.

 

[nonconformist]

Why use MS-Dos?

Because it's superior to windows, in that it allows almost anything non-BIOS related to be done froma command prompt, and that windows is (was?) nothing more than a thinly disguised GUI for people with the attention span and memory of a goldfish who want to mash at buttons?

Hell, I remember DOS used to be the default state of the system, and to go to windows you had to type "EXIT"

 

[Jerrymander]

Because it's superior to windows, in that it allows almost anything non-BIOS related to be done froma command prompt, and that windows is (was?) nothing more than a thinly disguised GUI for people with the attention span and memory of a goldfish who want to mash at buttons?

Hell, I remember DOS used to be the default state of the system, and to go to windows you had to type "EXIT"

True, but that's why we have Linux.

HEY I LIEK MASH BUTONZ

 

[Speedo]

Because it's superior to windows, in that it allows almost anything non-BIOS related to be done froma command prompt, and that windows is (was?) nothing more than a thinly disguised GUI for people with the attention span and memory of a goldfish who want to mash at buttons?

Hell, I remember DOS used to be the default state of the system, and to go to windows you had to type "EXIT"

And any time you want to play a game or do other "intensive" tasks, you get to spend an hour or 2 playing with autoexe.bat to try to get enough memory free for the proggy to run. And who cares about all that multitasking stuff anyway, what a load of hot air that is.

Yeah, those were the days.

 

[Grisu]

Yeah, those were the days.

hey, I actually liked wasting hours preparing different start-disks for different games

not that I want to go back to those times...

 

[nonconformist]

I never had problems starting any games.

D:/run/

 

[Speedo]

I never had problems starting any games.

D:/run/

You didn't try to do much DOS gaming then.

 

[nonconformist]

I was about seven at the time, give me a break man

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

My mom says she's an expert in DOS. I think she forgot, though, because I had to tell her the various commands, to install a game on the computer I bought for old games.