MS-DOS offers several functions to transfer text to the display. Version 1 supported only Teletype-like output capabilities; version 2 added an optional ANSI console driver to allow the programmer to clear the screen, position the cursor, and select colors and attributes with standard escape sequences embedded in the output. Programs that use only the MS-DOS functions will operate properly on any computer system that runs MS-DOS, regardless of the level of IBM hardware compatibility.
On IBM PC—compatible machines, the ROM BIOS contains a video driver that programs can invoke directly, bypassing MS-DOS. The ROM BIOS functions allow a program to write text or individual pixels to the screen or to select display modes, video pages, palette, and foreground and background colors. These functions are relatively efficient (compared with the MS-DOS functions, at least), although the graphics support is primitive.
Unfortunately, the display functions of both MS-DOS and the ROM BIOS were designed around the model of a cursor-addressable terminal and therefore do not fully exploit the capabilities of the memory-mapped, high-bandwidth display adapters used on IBM PC—compatible machines. As a result, nearly every popular interactive application with full-screen displays or graphics capability ignores both MS-DOS and the ROM BIOS and writes directly to the video controller's registers and regen buffer.
Programs that control the hardware directly are sometimes called "ill-behaved," because they are performing operations that are normally reserved for operating-system device drivers. These programs are a severe management problem in multitasking real-mode environments such as DesqView and Microsoft Windows, and they are the main reason why such environments are not used more widely. It could be argued, however, that the blame for such problematic behavior lies not with the application programs but with the failure of MS-DOS and the ROM BIOS——even six years after the first appearance of the IBM PC——to provide display functions of adequate range and power.