Double buffering (prebuffering?) text in command prompt

[Balrog]

As the title implies, I really don't know the name for what I'm trying to do, but here goes:

I'm making a real-time ASCII shooter in command prompt, but the delay from clearing the screen to couting (yes, that's a verb) all of the characters resembling the map will be atrocious. A computer engineer that I know informs me that there is a way to draw all of the text to an invisible buffer and then swap it out to the front all in one go with command prompt. My Google searches came up with nothing, so could anyone at least point me in the right direction with this?

Please remember that I'm trying to do this inside of command prompt and am only using ASCII characters. thanks in advance.

[Disch]

I'm making a real-time ASCII shooter in command prompt

Here's your problem. The command prompt is not designed for this kind of thing.

See this:

http://cplusplus.com/forum/articles/28558/

[webJose]

The double bufffering technique I know applies to Windows GUI programming, not console programming. Is this fellow programmer aware you were talking about a console program and not a Windows GUI program? If yes, then this is news to me, but then again, I rarely do console applications.

If such a thing as double buffering exists for console applications, I would imagine you would need to access the buffer directly. At this point I can only tell you that you need to call the Windows console API directly to achieve this, if at all possible.

I'll step down now to allow real experts in the topic, because I really am just a phony expert in this regard. :-)