VOGONS


First post, by Morchaiel

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Hello everyone,

I have a little problem with DOSBox. After a lot of searching on this forum and, of course, google, the problem persists.

Iinstalled DOSBox and D-Fend so I can properly play UFO - Enemy unknown. I was looking around for some savegame editors to play around with, and I found one.

DOSBox refuses to open it, however. The .exe-file of this editor attempts to load a file named "ESPAÑOL.MSG". DOSBox reads the "Ñ" as something that looks like an "=" with a vertical line coming from the middle of the lower stripe. After some searching, I discovered this is what you get when you hit alt+209 in MS DOS. The Ñ should be under alt+165.

Under windows, however, the Ñ is also under alt+0209. No matter how I rename the file, it seems to store my Ñ as "alt+0209", because DOSBox keeps interpreting it as that symbol I described above. Appearantly, MS-DOS just leaves out the first 0 in the alt-code.

I've tried simply renaming it under windows by using the alt-165 code, and I've tried to do so in DOSBox. So far, I've had no luck. The editor just won't open becasue of this one file.

Seems a bit stupid that it tries to load it, even when I use the editor's in-built "/LANGUAGE English" command-line parameter.

Anyway, does anyone know if there's a way around this, or to fix it?

Thanks,

David

Reply 1 of 9, by eL_PuSHeR

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[MOVED]

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Reply 2 of 9, by wd

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Those characters are not supported as it'd need custom translation from
the host OS to dos codepages.
Anyways if you wanna type that character and it's printed on your keyboard
(and was available in dos at the same position) check out the keyboardlayout=
entry in the dosbox.con

Reply 3 of 9, by Morchaiel

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WEll, the thing is, the character I need is available, under alt+165, but somehow in the filename it's stored under alt+0209, and DOSBox interprets this as alt+209. And for some reason, I can't succesfully rename the file.

If I type alt+165 in DOSBox, it shows the Ñ.

So I don't think it's the keyboard layout, since changing that wouldn't change the way DOSBox interprets the special characters codes.

Reply 4 of 9, by wd

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As i said, support for those characters in filenames is NOT available in dosbox exactly
for that reason that you'd need a translation for every OS/layout/dos layout combination.

Reply 5 of 9, by ripsaw8080

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A fairly easy way out of the situation would be to hack the filename in the executable (or its metadata) to use a plain "N" character, and rename the language file similarly. If the executable is packed, preventing you from modifying it, there is a DOS utility called UNP which can unpack most executable packing methods.

Reply 6 of 9, by Morchaiel

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Yeah, I thought of that, I just didn't expect there to be any tools out there that do that 😀. I just tried UNP, and it doesn't do anything, sadly.. It just tells me the file structure and size, no actual unpacking is being done.

I've tried searching for some other EXE-extractors, but none of them seem to make sense, to me 😖.

Reply 7 of 9, by wd

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Well use a hex editor and search for ESPA which should be there in plaintext
somewhere if the file is not packed.

There are a few generic unpackers like TRON which should work better on
non-standard packed files, other than that check the header of the exe file
for some ID strings to identify the packer.

Reply 8 of 9, by Morchaiel

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Yup, that did the trick 😁! Thanks a lot, I have no experience with this sort of thing at all, and I would never have guessed I could use a hex editor to edit anything in an exe-file.

Reply 9 of 9, by wd

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Well editing an .exe file is better done with a hex editor than a text editor 😀