ConsoleRenderer 0.1.0

What is ConsoleRenderer

This is a simple and easy-to-use library to help render images to the console that works on Windows or Linux. This allows a developer to easily build retro looking applications using C# and .NET.

I learned programming with QBasic on MS-DOS and miss the days where you can get graphics on screen with just a few lines of code, ConsoleRenderer is a bit of an homage to that minimal style of development. Modern graphics libraries tend to have a lot of ceremony to set up a render window and get things on screen, this library aims to be the opposite of that.

What's the performance like?

It varies, but on my Lenovo P51 laptop the pong example runs at ~800fps on Windows in a 120x30 size Powershell terminal inside Windows Terminal. The same size WSL terminal on Ubuntu runs at ~3600fps, which is considerably faster. Updating every character on screen every frame is a lot slower, and can be as low as 10fps on Windows, or ~50fps on Ubuntu in WSL.

I welcome more rigorous benchmarks, as well as suggestions to improve performance, but the bottom line is that it's fast enough for anything that doesn't redraw the whole screen every frame.

Why is it on GitHub

It's on GitHub because I enjoy little projects like this, and because I believe in sharing what you enjoy with others, who may also enjoy it.

What is the future of this project

Right now it's a fun little thing that I made. Maybe I will end up using it in other projects and need additional functionality, maybe other people want to use it in theirs, who knows?

How to build and run it

Simply open the solution in Visual Studio and hit run to get a simple console window with a blue bouncing ball. The sample project is just a basic example of how it may be used.

For other IDE's, be sure to have the .NET 6 SDK installed and any relevant plugins for C#. There should be no dependencies other than what is in the System namespaces.

Contributing

If there are changes you'd like to see, feel free to create an issue or a PR.