Windows 7

[Brian K. White]

On 12/14/2010 11:13 AM, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> On 12/14/2010 10:56 AM, Richard Kreiss wrote:
>> Is there a way to get filepro to open full screen and not in a window on a
>> machine running Windows 7?
>
> Microsoft dropped support for running console apps full screen back in
> Vista.  The most you can do is make the font as large as possible, without
> making the window larger than the screen.
>

"dropped support" is slightly misleading, making it sound impossible to 
get the desired end result. There are a bunch of sort of crappy ways to 
get the desired result or the outward appearance of it.

It's possible for a program to at least appear to do full text screen.
When I press Alt+Enter in PuTTY it goes full screen with the text going 
right to the edge of the screen and no window borders or task bar 
visible. In reality it's probably implemented like pressing F11 in 
chrome or firefox or setting a video player to full screen, various 
windows things can and do pop up or stay visible unless you tell them to 
go away, but it _looks_ exactly like plain old dos screen.
If putty can do it, fp could do it in theory, it just wouldn't remain a 
true console app.

Or, if you have Windows 7 Professional or above you can use XP Mode.
That's a completely terrible and inefficient way to run an app just to 
get that last little bit of screen border to disappear but it is possible.

Or, this article shows no less than three other ways.
None are very appealing solutions, but they're interesting to know about 
as options.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/27/workaround-to-this-system-does-not-support-full-screen-mode-in-windows-vista/

Since windows can draw text full screen to _appear_ like an old console 
full-screen, seems like it should be possible to make a sort of wrapper 
app that just does nothing but render the console apps screen in a 
regular window, which can then be made full-screen. Not like the dosbox 
thing above which is an OS emulator but just like putty or rxvt from cygwin.

In fact, it looks like this does almost just that:
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/downloads/detail?name=mintty-0.9.3-msys.zip

It runs cmd and zooms it full screen, but I doubt it will work for 
filepro since it appears to do more than just render the screen, it's a 
regular terminal emulator, no net connection, but like any other 
terminal emulator it uses ansi/vt key codes which is not what a win32 
console app does.

Looks like XP mode, or an XP video driver are your least-bad options.

-- 
bkw