Hi Paul, CP437 is very weak. It only covers german, swedish and finnish. It is only a "copy" of the table of characters available on those old CGA cards.All the rest on that codepage covers linedraw, block, shade, logical/mathematical, currency characters and a few greek letters (for mathematical purposes). Yes, it does provide "Ç/ç", "Ñ/ñ", "É/é" and "Æ/æ"... which are letters used on languages that require other upper-/lowercase accented letters and a few other lowercase-only accented letters, but you won't be able to perfectly type any language that way.
On those days, there were alternate versions of cp437 for other languages --- perhaps they were also "copies" of tables of characters hardcoded into CGA cards sold on particular markets: cp860 for portuguese, cp854 for spanish (which I know to exist but I didn't find an image of it yet), and many others. Then, we had the multilingual codepages: cp850 for western Europe, cp852 for central Europe, cp855 for eastern Europe and a few others. There's a catch here: MS-DOS only provided cp850 for western Europe; IBM-DOS also provided cp858, which is "cp850+Euro sign", that's why it is the official codepage for western european languages on FreeDOS. Ideally, cp859 would be the official codepage for western european languages because it is "cp850+Euro sign+Šš/Žž", used in estonian and few proper names (country names, etc.) and loanwords in finnish and "Œ/œ/Ÿ" to finally and perfectly handle french but it happens that many keyboard layouts have labeled characters on them which were dismissed on cp859 to make room for those extra letters. (On FreeDOS, cp859 is available and can be used with many keyboard layouts.) Sorry for typing too much. I always get carried away when talking about it. :) Yes, DOSBOX handles codepages perfectly. Henrique Em 18/12/2015 01:26, Paul Dufresne escreveu: > I am not sure we can expect most languages could be encoded in CP437 > (Code page 437 [IBM]). > Maybe a file in CP437 should have something like "CP=850" and then the > 3 others file would be encoded in that specific code page. Then the > installer could use chcp to select the codepage before installation. > Does Dosbox support well codepage other 437? > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
