Special characters used by game appear wrong \ VOGONS

Special characters used by game appear wrong

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First post, by dirkh

Posted on 2008-03-09, 08:37

dirkh Offline

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Hi!

I recently stumbled upon DOSBox while trying to get an old DOS-Game (namely Stonekeep) to run on my WinXP machine.

I got it to work fine except for one relatively small thing:

The program is a german version and tries to print german special characters (e.g. "äöüß") in menus and dialog descriptions -- and fails.

I did manage to apply a german keyboard layout, so when I type something like "ä" in the DOSbox command prompt, I actually get to see it, but that doesn't help with the (pre-stored) output of the program.

I did try to set codepage 850, but that didn't help either.

Any ideas anybody?

Reply 1 of 7, by dirkh

Posted on 2008-03-09, 08:40

dirkh Offline

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I posted this here because I consider this an internationalization btw. codepage problem and not an application specific one...

Reply 2 of 7, by wd

Posted on 2008-03-09, 08:49

wd Offline

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Start dosbox with a clean dosbox.conf, then type "keyb gr" and mount your
drives/cdrom stuff. Don't know if it would work for the game though.

Reply 3 of 7, by dirkh

Posted on 2008-03-10, 10:51

dirkh Offline

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@wd: Nope, didn't work. Thank you for the prompt reply, though 😀.

Annother clarification: I can type according to my german keyboard layout just fine - even in the game I can see every "ä" I type correctly. Its the data the game reads from (text?)-files that gets "lost in translation".

Does DOSbox use emulated or host system routines to decode text files? If it's the latter, the problem probably isn't resolvable (without major changes in DOSbox) 🙁.

Reply 4 of 7, by wd

Posted on 2008-03-10, 11:14

wd Offline

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I don't know how Stonekeep does the character translation. Usually localized
games use special code for that anyways, so don't rely on DOS at all (as they
have custom fonts etc.)

Reply 5 of 7, by jal

Posted on 2008-03-13, 16:22

jal Offline

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dirkh wrote:
I can type according to my german keyboard layout just fine - even in the game I can see every "ä" I type correctly. Its the data the game reads from (text?)-files that gets "lost in translation".

Are we talking about this Stonekeep? Since it uses graphics for output, code pages and such should not be the problem. Are you sure you haven't got English version and German version files mixed up (perhaps some corrupt download from an abaondonware site)? Can you attach a screen dump of what goes wrong?

JAL