Russian Windows 3.11 perhaps?

Nope. I need to work with Russian texts in English version of Windows. I don't want to explain why. I'm just asking the question.

Installing fonts and keyboard for Windows appears not enough. I guess I should set something in dosbox.conf, maybe keyboardlayout= or language=. May be it has to do with text encoding, but I have no idea about it.

As far as I know Windows does its own drawing, all DosBox does is render that screen for you as a collection of pixels. The problem lies with Windows and whatever you did, not DosBox.

How can I make DOSbox perform config.sys of the guest system?

In general...you can't.
Depends on what you're trying to do, maybe use FreeDOS.

If this approach doesn't work, you might try some of the Cyrillic support programs such as those formerly offered by Fingertip Software:

http://www.fingertipsoft.com/download.html

If memory serves, these are only 45-day trials, but it might be sufficient for your needs. Note that Win 3.11 is specifically supported in earlier versions.

mstvsky wrote:

How can I make DOSbox perform config.sys of the guest system?

In some cases you can use a command line program like DEVLOAD to load device drivers, making a config.sys completely unnecessary.

Otherwise, you will need to boot DOS within DOSBox, as in Install DOS in DOSBox , for example. This technique has the disadvantage of preventing mounted directories from being accessed, however.

mstvsky wrote:

How can I make DOSbox perform config.sys of the guest system?

Hm, as already written, it is not officially implemented, but if the game is nice it would accept a fake config.sys file in its emulated C: drive as well.

Thank you for participating in my challenge!

Ok, clear. I would not touch config.sys. I thought that there are some language settings in config.sys that I need to be performed in order to solve my goal.

As I wrote in the head post, I need to work with Russian texts on English Windows. I see two ways how to achive this.

1. Install English version of Windows and make it somehow compatible with Russian texts.
It has appeared not enough to just install Russian fonts and keyboard. I guess I have to change some encoding setting in one of those files: dosbox.conf, win.ini, system.ini. Changing language and keyboardlayout in dosbox.conf doesn't help as well.

2. Install Russian version of Windows and switch it's interface to English one.
Russian Windows works OK with Russian texts. But I still need Windows to look English. Changing "Language" within "International" settings window doesn't help.

Any advises?

So if it works with russian Win3.x then look through the system.ini and win.ini of the russian Windows and try to find what might be responsible for displaying russian text. Then try putting the russian files. Into the English Windows. Probably a lot trial and error until you got it right. Good luck 😉

mstvsky wrote:

As I wrote in the head post, I need to work with Russian texts on English Windows.

Did you ever have this working on a "real" computer without using DOSBox? Or is this something you're attempting for the first time?

If your programs still run under Windows XP, you would probably be much better off using Windows XP in a virtual machine.

Using hit-and-miss I've figured out that Russian text ability depends on "device=" string in [windows] section of WIN.INI. It was filled with "device=Generic / Text Only,TTY,LPT1:". And since I removed everything after equal mark — IT WORKS! In both Russian and English versions of Windows!!!

Thank you all 😎

PS: this string sets printer used by default. Depending on what is set here, it affects on fonts somehow.

yeah!!!!

Dominus wrote:

Russian Windows 3.11 perhaps?

Perhaps YES! But here I've met a new challenge: macros don't work in Russian Winword 2.0.

I have:
DOSbox 0.74,
Windows 3.11fwg Russian
Winword 2.0 Russian,
Winword 2.0 English,
Custom .dot containing macros, which are not made by me and i can't change them.

Those macros work only in following conditions:
1. Within "Internetional" setting, decimal separator is "." .
2. Using Winword 2.0 English.

With any other combinations of international settings and language version of word, I get an error message on starting macros: "this is not a valid measurement".
Any ideas, guys?

mstvsky wrote:

Those macros work only in following conditions:
1. Within "Internetional" setting, decimal separator is "." .

Are you referring to another setting in Winword, or a setting in a Windows control panel?

mstvsky wrote:

Using hit-and-miss I've figured out that Russian text ability depends on "device=" string in [windows] section of WIN.INI. It was filled with "device=Generic / Text Only,TTY,LPT1:". And since I removed everything after equal mark — IT WORKS! In both Russian and English versions of Windows!!!

Thank you all 😎

PS: this string sets printer used by default. Depending on what is set here, it affects on fonts somehow.

It's logical...the fonts are there but Windows knows that some of those devices can't use them.

Jorpho, I mean Windows control panel setting.

Truetype fonts only work in Windows 3.x after installing a printer driver. (The printer doesn't have to exist physically.) Maybe this applies only to some applications like WinWord. The printer probably has to be able to print the TrueType font so any graphical printer should be ok.

WordBasic (used in WinWord 2.0) was localized, i.e. the language (or at least APIs) were translated into other languages, see eg. http://www.multilingualblog.com/?tag=wordbasic
I don't know if this was done for Russian.

I'm not sure why you're bumping this. The macros are obviously setting page margins or tab stops or something using numbers that use "." as the decimal separator, such that if Word is only expecting numbers to be specified with a comma, it will reject a number containing a period as an invalid measurement.