OT (includes Latin and MSDOS): Suetonius auf dem Bildschirm
John Griffith Dean
This has nothing to do with the good Professor Tolkien, Middle Earth, and,
most sadly, contributes nothing to furthering the discussion about whether
or not Balrogs have Barrow Blades. It is, however, a dusty procrastination,
so it may after all find its place here:
HOW TO STICK ARCANE MESSAGES UP ON YOUR DOS SCREEN
I was procrastinating from writing a term paper (well, obviously, I still
am), and the thought struck me (as such thoughts tend to during such
situations), that it is an absolute necessity at this moment to put the
words of the immortal Suetonius after Caesar's decisive victory at Zela
in 47 BC up on my DOS screen. And to do so such that I would always see
it, even when I didn't want to, the two thousand year old words being
burned viscious into my slowly yielding neurons.
By placing text in the upper right of the screen, a completely disused
area in now filled with something of marginal pedagogical value. One
can use this for language learning, vocabulary, etc.. Or for Suetonius.
Those running a DOS box in Windows 95/98/whatever may find this area to
the right filled up, owing to the long file names. If you're an old frut
like me and spend most of your computing time at the genuine DOS prompt
(setGUI=0 in the [Options] of MSDOS.SYS, manually typing "WIN" to run
the Operating System That Must Not Be Named only when necessary), this
is not a concern.
Viel Spass damit, the Road goes ever on....
*********SNIP OUT FOR CAESAR.BAT BEGINS*****************
@echo off
set Q1=In triumpho Caesar praetulit
set Q2=hunc titulum:
set Q3=$e[1;31mVeni, $e[5mVidi$e[0;1;31m, Vici$e[0;37m
prompt $p$g$e[s$e[1;50H%q1%$e[2;57H%q2%$e[3;55H $e[4;55H%q3%$e[u
*********SNIP OUT ENDS**********************************
Details for those who want to know:
-the DOS command line allows only 128 characters of text. This is why
I have put some of the formating and all of the actual characters to
be presented in environment variables (%q1%, etc.). Note: because
all those set statements make a modest demand upon the DOS environment,
it may be necessary to reload the command interpreter with a larger
environment storage allocation. E.g.
COMMAND /P /E:1024
-if, after 30 seconds, the charm wears off and the blinking "Vidi"
becomes unbearably annoying, the prompt can be returned to normal
via "prompt $p$g"
-if CAESAR.BAT is to be put in the AUTOEXEC.BAT for automatic
execuation, precede it with "CALL", so that the rest of the AUTOEXEC.BAT
will continue to execute. I.e.
CALL CAESAR.BAT
-the $e symbol represents the ASCII 27 escape symbol when telling the
DOS "prompt" command to reconfigure itself
-$e[s and $e[u tell prompt to save and to restore the current cursor
position, respectively
-$e[(two numbers separated by a semicolon)H sets the vertical and
horizontal position of the cursor (don't forget the "H")
-the part in the prompt command above with the blank spaces erases an
otherwise unsightly repetition of the red text on the fourth line as
the screen is scrolled up
-$e[(a bunch of numbers separated by semicolons)m sets the colour and
related qualities of the following text. A short and not exhaustive
list of these values:
Attribute Foreground Colour Background Colour
0 normal 30 black
1 bold 31 red (like the foreground,
5 blinking 32 green except 40 through 47)
7 reverse 33 orange
34 blue
35 violet
36 cyan
37 white
* * * * *
P.S. My thanks to whoever it was who pointed the group to the modest
and scientific appraisal of Dungeons and Dragons at www.chick.com. I
printed out the tract
http://www.chick.com/tractimages76500/0046/0046_01.gif
and used it with my students in ESL classes. Much merriment proceeded...
Wayne Farmer
>
> HOW TO STICK ARCANE MESSAGES UP ON YOUR DOS SCREEN
Matthew Harris
John Griffith Dean wrote in message ...
John Griffith Dean
Was: Re: OT (includes Latin and MSDOS): Suetonius auf dem Bildschirm
Am Montag, 10. Sep.2001, Wayne Farmer <Wayne...@compuserve.com> schrieb:
>> HOW TO STICK ARCANE MESSAGES UP ON YOUR DOS SCREEN
>You forgot to mention that "DEVICE=ANSI.SYS" needs to be
>included in CONFIG.SYS
Thanks for posting that! I had one of those "Duh! I could'a had a V-8"
moments of illumination about 30 seconds after I clicked send w.r.t that
point. I've always loaded the little sucker, so, as in many other things
De Rerum Dos, it's a fight to imagine how other people have configured
their systems. Kinda like the challenge of the Ring Bearer...
Am Montag, 10. Sep.2001, Matthew Harris <mnha...@aracnet.com> schrieb:
>Um, couldn't we change this around so that it did this in Quenya?
I must bow before the truly arcane, I thought reaching back to the
near BC's was dusty and irrelevant enough, but, hey, where there's
a will, there's a way. (See the batch file at the end.)
Several of the Tolkien pages up on the web offer Quenya fonts for Windows.
I don't know if anyone has ever gone to the trouble of making a DOS code
page that provides the same features. Or, for that matter, for the runic
writing the Tolkster presents in the Appendices of RotK, or even standard
Anglo-Saxon runes as adorn the map in The Hobbit.
Such a requirement would need to be fulfilled in order to have Quenya blinking
away in the upper right corner of your DOS screen. It would likely also
affect the rest of the type whilst in DOS Modus. Does anybody know if
Tolkien or Runic Code Pages for DOS have ever been made?
In the meantime, <flag: shameless self promtion=ON> here's another text-
posting batch file, which presents my "Lord of the Bogs" poem I dirtied the
newsgroup with three years ago. Wasawasawasa! It ain't Quenya, but (it's
been a while since I read the books) I believe it is translated therefrom.
What can I say? We are but poodles weeing on the collars of dwarves
standing on the shoulders of giants...
Note that this one makes monstrous, wasteful, Sauronesque use of the
environment. I had to reload the command interpreter with two kilobytes
set aside for env variables. Thus:
COMMAND /P /E:2048
And of course make sure ANSI.SYS is loaded in your config sys, as Wayne
pointed out. DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ANSI.SYS as a line in the CONFIG.SYS,
with the path adopted as appropriate.
I also came across the instrinsic limits of this nonsense whilst writing
the batch file below: not even the modest "Ring Poem" of Mr. Tolkien (or
a puerile takeoff on it) will fit into the allocation for the prompt
command. It is thus necessary to break it into parts. (Taking out the
colours and replacing $e with a real ASCII 27 is not enough to sneak
under the limit.)
The permanence of the enterprise is thus rather interrupted, making the
whole exercise rather academic: only half of the poem can be displayed
in a constant fashion at a time. Type "BOG" to see the first half, and
"BOG -" to see the second. One can briefly see the whole in its
entirety by clearing the screen with "CLS" and then displaying both halves
in rapid succession.
With little fiddling, one could of course adopt the below batch file to
display the proper version of the poem. I'm just in a puerile mood today.
*****************snip from below this line for BOG.BAT***********************
@echo off
set QA=$e[1;50H The $e[1;35mBog$e[0;37m Poem
set QB=$e[3;50HThree Bogs for Elven Kings,
set QC=$e[4;50H their slender bottoms to fit
set QD=$e[5;50HSeven for the Dwarf Lords,
set QE=$e[6;50H upon their loos of stone
set QF=$e[7;50HNine for mortal men,
set QG=$e[8;50H doomed to sit
set QH=$e[9;50HOne for the $e[1;34mdark lord$e[0;37m,
set QI=$e[10;50H when his bowels moan
set QJ=$e[12;50HIn the land of $e[1;31mMordor$e[0;37m,
set QK=$e[13;50H where even the shadows shit.
set QL=$e[14;50HOne Bog to rule them all,
set QM=$e[15;50H one bog a great cup
set QN=$e[16;50HOne Bog to wet your arse when
set QO=$e[17;50H someone leaves the seat up
set QP=$e[18;50HIn the land of Mordor,
set QQ=$e[19;50H where even the shadows shit
set q1=%qb% %qc%%qd%%qe%%qf%%qg% %qh%%qi%
set q2=%qj% %qk%%ql%%qm% %qn%%qo%%qp% %qq%
prompt $p$g$e[s%qa%$e[2;50H %q1% $e[u
if "%1"=="-" prompt $p$g$e[s$e[11;50H %q2%$e[u