It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode (so as to occupy the entire screen).

Windows Console instances are typically used for apps that do not need to display images but might use color.

In 2019, the console host was open-sourced under the MIT License, alongside Windows Terminal.

One mode places the text in a window and uses an operating system's font rendering.

In Windows XP and earlier, the full-screen console uses a hardware text mode and uploads a raster font to the video adapter.

[6] Users can change the color palette or font, either on the system-wide level or app-level.

Each instance of a console app themselves, however, cannot change its color palette or font on the fly.

Vcond then had to pass the keyboard input to the System VM, and then finally to the Win32 console application.

Besides performance, another problem with this implementation is that drives that are local to a DOS VM are not visible to a Win32 console application.

[9] For backward compatibility, the console APIs exist in two versions: Unicode and non-Unicode.

Even UTF-8 is available as "code page 65001"[10] (displaying only from the UCS-2 subset of full Unicode[citation needed]).