4 ms·
Codepage 437 had the characters for suits of cards.
by kibibu 3y ago
Codepage 437 had the characters for suits of cards.
- donatj 3y agoHow did one type such a thing back then?
- bni 3y agoHolding down left-alt and typing a 3 number sequence
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thristian 3y agoHold down Alt and type 3 on the numeric keypad, I think. In Windows, you can type characters in the Latin1 character set by holding down Alt, then typing a zero on the numeric keypad, then the code you want, such as Alt+0233 for "é". The leading zero disambiguates Latin1 characters from the traditional DOS character set, so you'd have to type Alt+130 to get the same character that way.
- alfiedotwtf 3y agoAnother Easter Egg was “mkdir Alt+255”, which created a directory with the name of the ASCII code 255 which is blank on the command line terminal. Tools like DIR would skip them so you could hide files in there
- hinkley 3y agoI just saw a demo of this the other day clicking around YouTube. In later versions of windows you could change the folder icon to be an empty image, then have it on your desktop where nobody could see it.
- jandrese 3y agoHiding it on the desktop is one of those things that seems like genius until some random Windows thing decides to do a desktop cleanup and rearranges your icons.
- hermitdev 3y agoALT+255 also made the directories inaccessible in Win9x. Couldn't open them in explorer, for instance, without renaming to remove the special character.
- ChickeNES 3y agoHeh, that one in particular I remember well from wanting to spell Pokémon correctly as a kid
- shever73 3y agoAlt + 003 on the numeric keypad, IIRC.
- rep_lodsb 3y agoIn general the comments saying "Alt+Numpad" are correct, however it doesn't work for this character! ♥ is code 3, which is the same as Ctrl+C - typing this at the DOS prompt would cancel any input on the current line (and also flush disk buffers IIRC - something left over from CP/M) It is possible to detect if the user pressed Ctrl+C or Alt+3, using BIOS calls or direct hardware access. However, the DOS console driver wouldn't do it this way, and instead convert both into the same ASCII code. The only possible way to pass this character to the "copy" command (which was built into the command interpreter) would be to write a program that invokes "COMMAND.COM /C COPY /♥". Story seems suspicious, if it happened at all it might have displayed "I ♥ SEX" when some other switch was present, then someone mixed things up?
- JdeBP 3y agoMost of the code pages had them, in fact, as they normally didn't vary in the C0 control character range.
- mschaef 3y agoThere for the purpose of making it easy to write card games. There were also a number of characters inspired by Wang word processors, which there'd been an early plan to reproduce on the PC.
- nxobject 3y agoPlenty of Blackjack demo apps, I'm sure.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoTo be precise, the heart is a the control character (the range of characters between 0 and 31). Code pages define the content of characters 128 to 255. Control characters are all the same between all DOS code pages.