You can run a console application like Liberal Crime Squad in fullscreen if you press Alt-Enter, at least on Windows XP with a real computer. Starting with Windows Vista, the specifications for video drivers changed and having a fullscreen text video mode is no longer required (even though it does still use the fullscreen text video mode for a boot-up menu or a blue screen of death). So many cheaper computers that have come out since the introduction of Windows Vista and later versions no longer support fullscreen text modes. However on Windows XP and earlier versions, any console application like Liberal Crime Squad can become full screen if you press Alt-Enter. You can also modify the shortcut to make the program always run in fullscreen when it starts up (if you run an .exe file for a console application directly, Windows creates a shortcut for it in some subdirectory of your Windows directory, to keep track of things like your font size settings, whether you use Lucida Console or Raster Fonts, whether it's windowed or fullscreen, etc., and then the next time you run that same .exe file Windows will detect its existing shortcut and use whatever settings you saved the last time). On Windows Vista and later, the question of whether or not Alt-Enter works to make things fullscreen in text modes depends on your video drivers. But mostly it is Microsoft's fault, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) introduced in Windows Vista and continued in later versions such as Windows 7 and 8 basically removes the feature of fullscreen text mode, at least for 16-bit programs and if you have hardware acceleration enabled, but you can get around this by disabling hardware acceleration for your video card (reverting to a pre-WDDM video driver mode that supports fullscreen text modes) or disabling your video card's driver (likewise reverting to a pre-WDDM video driver mode that supports fullscreen text modes). Anyway, this problem is a bug introduced in Windows Vista by Microsoft which Microsoft does not intend on fixing because they don't care (if Windows were an open source project then somebody could just edit the source code to fix this bug, submit the patch to Microsoft, and it'd be fixed, and if Microsoft refused to accept patches like this that fixed bugs people wanted fixed, someone could fork the Windows project, fix outstanding bugs like this, and produce a better operating system). Or if Microsoft actually had to compete for market share in the desktop operating system market, they might actually start caring about people's complaints about bugs in Windows and start taking their customers' concerns seriously (they actually have started taking improving Internet Explorer seriously in recent years after its market share plummeted). This bug in the WDDM component of Windows could easily be fixed by re-adding fullscreen text mode support to the next version of WDDM (Windows Vista had WDDM 1.0, Windows 7 has WDDM 1.1, Windows 8.0 has WDDM 1.2, and Windows 8.1 has WDDM 1.3). But it would probably take a LOT of customers complaining for them to fix this in their next operating system (which presumably will have WDDM 1.4, which could have fullscreen text mode as a mandatory feature for compliant display drivers to implement, if enough of us little people demanded it).
TL;DR version: This is a bug in MS Windoze Vista and later but there are workarounds if you are leet. Microsoft sucks, don't use Windows, it also sucks, if enough people quit using Windows, Microsoft will eventually get the message and make a better OS to try to win us back, and then we won't need to use leet workarounds for the bugs in Windoze anymore.
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Topic: Fullscreen? (Read 4935 times)