Old School ANSI Support in Windows

Has anyone successfully enabled support for ANSI escape sequences in the Windows CMD environment? I'd love to know a Windows native way of enabling ANSI but would settle for a third party utility as well. In my experience, Windows "kind of" supports ANSI in the 16-bit COMMAND.COM interpreter but only if ANSI.SYS is loaded in the CONFIG.NT and only if the COMMAND.COM executes the ANSI code as a passed parameter. To explain...

On a Windows XP computer, I created a text file named "TEST.TXT" which contains "(ESC)]36mTest" ("ESC" being the ASCII 27 escape code). If I launch CMD.EXE and then issue the command "TYPE TEST.TXT", I see "(ESC)]36mTest". If I launch CMD.EXE /A and issue the same command, I get the same result. If I run COMMAND.COM and issue the same command, I get the same result. However, if I open CMD.EXE and run "COMMAND.COM /C TYPE TEST.TXT", I see the word "Test" in Cyan, as I would expect.

The end result is that I want to be able to create batch files (as CMDs) containing ANSI escape sequences for the X & Y cursor positioning. (It would also be ultra cool to re-live my BBS days of viewing ANSI art from the CLI.) If I overlooked a previous post on this subject, please point me in the right direction.

Thanks

 

Unfortunately there is no way to run cmd with different colors in the same window. You need a third party tool like my own one or this one with some more options.

 

If color was the only thing I was looking for, I could probably make do, to some extent, natively, with the "COLOR" command. What I'm primarily looking for is the ability to designate cursor position... (ESC)]5D or (ESC)]s and (ESC)]u

Thanks!

 

I see.
Try to run old DOS software in DOSBox.
CMD doesn't support these things, so you have to use some small tools as suggested. Have a look at gotoxy to set the cursor to a defined position...
If these things won't help I'm at my wits end