Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Detecting ANSI.SYS
Message-ID: <1920@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 31 Mar 89 21:54:47 GMT
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 18

I'm looking for a reliable and portable way of determining if ANSI.SYS or
an equivalent driver (NANSI.SYS, FANSI.SYS, ANSI.COM, etc) is loaded.
It should also work with versions of MSDOS that have ANSI.SYS built in
(like the Japanese versions).

I checked PC Mag's ANSI.COM clone to see what it did. It checks to see
if the string "CON" appears 10 bytes past where interrupt 29h is hooked.
This can't be very reliable since ANSI.COM itself doesn't put the CON
string in.

I seem to recall that in another issue PC Mag published a technique for
doing this, but I can't find it (and some of my back issues are missing).

My purpose is to write a portable program that can use ANSI stuff to dress
up the screen, but will revert to a dumb line-by-line mode if it's not
present.

P.S. Looking at CONFIG.SYS for ANSI.SYS is not reliable.