> It typically uses 256 characters exemplified by the font CP437
I have fond memories of code page 437 (CP437). Code 1 is a smiley face. So is code 2. How cool is that! Codes 3 to 6 are playing card suits. The higher codes also contained line and box drawing characters. This allowed writing simple text adventure games that could be embellished with these graphical symbols. The smileys, lines, boxes, blocks, triangles, etc. could be used to add character to a text adventure game.
Shameless plug: I recently wrote a small toolkit to render CP437 characters on a HTML5 canvas for a retro-style game project I was working on.
For an example of what could be done with CP437, see Castle Adventure, an adventure game with roguelike elements which used the CP437 glyphs to represent objects and the walls of the castle itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_xhGQbxDPg
I had an MS-DOS app calls SCRPAINT which was a painting app for the 80x25 text mode. You could draw lines and it would do the right thing when lines bended at right angles or crossed by looking up the junction character code for the two lines.
I have fond memories of code page 437 (CP437). Code 1 is a smiley face. So is code 2. How cool is that! Codes 3 to 6 are playing card suits. The higher codes also contained line and box drawing characters. This allowed writing simple text adventure games that could be embellished with these graphical symbols. The smileys, lines, boxes, blocks, triangles, etc. could be used to add character to a text adventure game.
Shameless plug: I recently wrote a small toolkit to render CP437 characters on a HTML5 canvas for a retro-style game project I was working on.
Source: https://github.com/susam/pcface
Demo: https://susam.github.io/pcface/src/demo.html