I'm trying to make a (somewhat) stylish DOS menu as a present for my father.
I was able to get the whole menu system to work, but I wanted to gussy it up with some box drawing characters and, possibly, colored text.
In this YouTube video, the user shows an example of what I'm trying to do (example at the 5:00 mark), but doesn't explain how those characters are being rendered. In the Notepad document, it is displayed as goofy characters.
Do I need to save the file with a special type of encoding? Can it only be done in Notepad (I'm using TextEdit on Mac)? Can someone provide an example menu that can be added to DOSBox's [autoexec] config?
Also, I'm not sure if it is possible, but how can the text color/background color be changed? When running DOSBox initially, it shows their welcome screen with a blue background and box drawing characters, so I would think all of that is possible.
I tried using escaped unicode characters and I tried using a capital-E acute (as shown in the linked video), but they just render funky stuff when run in DOSBox.
The discrepancy in characters is a result of different code pages being used in character rendering. English-speaking Windows uses ANSI code page 1252 (otherwise known as Latin-1), while DOS uses OEM code page 437, or IBM-PC.
The codepage that Windows uses will vary based on your system language, so you many need to experiment to find the correct characters, but basically, find the character you want to print in 437 (say ╔, which is 200) and then in your code use the 1252 version (where 200 is È). Then save the file in ANSI encoding.