ASCII issue in DOS 7.1? \ VOGONS

ASCII issue in DOS 7.1?

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First post, by sillynerd

Posted on 2023-10-27, 20:35

sillynerd Offline

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So, I recently created a new 128GB CF drive for my DOS/WFW3.11 machine. I went with DOS 7.1 (CDU) for this project so I wasn't limited to the old 2GB drive size. It works great for how I use it. However, I did notice one minor problem that drives me completely insane. ASCII characters seem to be wrong somehow. The best example I can give is opening the dos edit command the interface looks weird. Instead of the normal solid lines around the text area they are are all dashed now. And the scroll bar is using the ASCII character box with the diamond in it, instead of the nice plain box you normally get. It's not a big deal, but I hate it enough that I really want to try and fix it. Anyone ever seen this?

Reply 1 of 5, by VileR

Posted on 2023-10-27, 20:40

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Probably some combination of COUNTRY.SYS, MODE, CHCP is setting a different code page. Try looking for these in your config.sys / autoexec.bat and getting rid of them, or if you're unsure post the contents of those files here.

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Reply 2 of 5, by Gmlb256

Posted on 2023-10-27, 20:52

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I'm quite familiar with that "version" of EDIT.COM which for some reason the ASCII characters used to represent the lines and scroll bars are altered, the legitimate one that comes from a Windows 9x installation shows them properly.

Changing the code page won't fix that, the solution would be replacing the file.

Reply 3 of 5, by Jo22

Posted on 2023-10-27, 22:44

Jo22 Offline

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Hm. Maybe it's the Chinese version or something ?
I remember that DOS/V (the Japanese MS-DOS 6.20) also has programs included that have two modes, English and localized.
Maybe the EDIT in CDU is similar and uses different characters for some reason.

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Reply 4 of 5, by sillynerd

Posted on 2023-10-28, 02:10

sillynerd Offline

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Thank you for everyone's reply. Gmlb256 was correct. I simply grabbed the edit.com and edit.hlp from dos622 and it looks just like it should. I appreciate everyone taking the time to offer help.

Reply 5 of 5, by Azarien

Posted on 2023-10-28, 14:51

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edit.com from DOS 6.22 is significantly different from edit.com included with Windows 95 and 98. Essentially, the 6.22 one runs qbasic in a special editor-only mode. It also doesn't support long file names, even with DOSLFN and such.

On the other hand, an unmodified edit.com from Windows 9x is a standalone editor (does not depend on qbasic), looks a bit different and supports LFNs if paired with doslfn (or run under Windows).

I don't have both at hand to compare, but perhaps what you saw was a combination of factors, like
- different standard versions of edit
- modified non-standard version of edit.com
- codepage stuff in your autoexec.bat/config.sys (which you may need or not)

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